Instant Husband

Shared interests, she finally decided. People with shared interests were drawn together because they had something in common to discuss. So what interests did she share with Nick? They were both survivors of a disastrous first marriage They both were lonely—at least Maggie claimed her cousin was lonely, and from what she’d seen so far, Maggie was probably right. They both wanted a secure relationship, to be part of a family group. But two of those things were more negative than positive. She needed an interest to talk about that didn’t bring bad memories to the surface. But what? She chewed on her lip uncertainly. She wasn’t sure. Maybe her best bet would be to get Nick talking about himself and his life and maybe she could find something there to share with him. Something to use as a foundation to build a friendship on.

But first she had to get rid of Snake. Snake was absolute death to any kind of conversation. In fact, his very presence was akin to the proverbial wet blanket.

Obviously Snake had no more desire for her company than she had for his, because the minute the truck stopped, he scrambled out and headed toward the barn. “I’m going ta check the fencing on the north pasture,” he said as he hurried toward the barn.

Get Nick talking, Ann told herself as she slowly climbed out of the truck. But talking about what? The ranch! She suddenly realized that she was standing in the middle of his greatest interest. Surely there was something on the ranch that she could find interesting without having to fake it. At the very least, questions about the ranch would serve as an opening for conversation.

“Is this a slack time for the ranch?” she asked, breaking the silence.

“Spring?” Nick looked shocked at her question. “The calves are born in the spring.”

“Oh?” Ann looked around. From the porch steps there wasn’t a bit of stock to be seen. “Where do you keep them?” she continued, hoping she didn’t sound as idiotic as she felt.

“Most of them stay in the fields with their mothers. If they have a problem, we keep them there.” Nick gestured toward the far barn. “Perhaps I ought to show you around the place before I get back to work.”

Success, Ann thought, feeling a sense of accomplishment lift her spirits.

“I’d very much like to see things.” Ann was careful to keep her voice matter-of-fact. She didn’t want him to think that she was trying to coerce him into anything. Or—a flush warmed her thin cheeks—that she was trying to come on to him.

“We can…” Nick paused as he caught sight of a cloud of dust moving down the dirt road from the highway to the house. He squinted, trying to get a better look, and was rewarded by a red gleam from the sun reflecting off the lights on top.

The sheriff’s car, he realized with a quick glance at Ann, who was also watching the car approach. Damn! Why did Sherrie have to come in person. A call would have sufficed to fill him in on the latest developments in the cattle disappearances. Ann was bound to already have a list of things wrong with ranch life. If she were to discover that there were cattle thieves running loose…

“Why don’t you go change into something more suitable,” he blurted out, using the first excuse he could think of to get rid of her.

Something more suitable! The words hit Ann with the force of a blow, dislodging bitter memories of her first husband’s caustic comments about her lack of fashion flair. Her feeling of pleasure at Nick’s willingness to show her the ranch was buried beneath the humiliating flood of memories, and she felt her skin tighten painfully, as if it were bracing for an additional blow.

“Yes, of course,” she muttered, escaping into the house. She closed the door behind her and leaned back against it. She took a deep breath to try to steady her racing heart.

Finally she straightened up and headed toward the stairs. You’re mixing up the past with the present, she told herself. Nick isn’t Bill. Nor is he responsible for anything Bill did. Judge Nick by what Nick does.

All Nick actually said was that you should change into something more suitable. She glanced down at her cream wool jacket. It really wasn’t a very practical outfit for exploring a ranch. It was too easy to soil and too hard to clean.

But even if his request was logical, why make it when someone was coming? Why not introduce her first? Was he ashamed of her? Don’t worry about it, she ordered herself as she pushed open the door to her bedroom. You can’t second-guess everything.

She hurriedly slipped out of her suit, carefully hanging it in the narrow closet. She knew she was right about not allowing her imagination to run riot. What she didn’t know was how to stop the past from coloring the present.

She sighed as she began to scramble into jeans. She could only try. Maybe when she knew Nick better, she’d find it easier to keep him separated in her mind from Bill. Because if she couldn’t…Ann shivered violently. If she couldn’t, then she would have allowed Bill to not only destroy her first marriage but her second.

A spark of anger flickered to life. She refused to give Bill that much power over her. She wasn’t that weak. She drew on the pair of jeans and jammed her feet into her new sneakers. She had more pride than that. She pressed her lips together in determination. She could make of this marriage anything she wanted.

Well, almost anything. She yanked a thick, green cableknit sweater over her head. She did have to take into account what Nick was willing to invest in the marriage. And at the moment what he was investing was a tour of the ranch—an opening she intended to take full advantage of.

Ann emerged from the house and paused in surprise when she realized that the car sitting in front of the house was a sheriff’s car. And the uniformed officer leaning against its hood talking to Nick was unlike any officer she’d ever seen. The woman was a petite, curvaceous blonde who couldn’t have been more than four-ten.

The woman looked up and, catching sight of Ann, gave her a wide smile that appeared genuine even to Ann’s critical eyes.

“Welcome to Wyoming, Ann. I’m Sherrie Bellington, the sheriff’s one and only deputy. I couldn’t believe it when Mabel said that Nick was going to get married again.” Sherrie chuckled, displaying perfect white teeth. “Truth to tell, I didn’t think old Snake’d let him do it.”

Ann shook the hand Sherrie held out. “He wasn’t any too happy about it.”

“So she wanted to come out and meet you,” Nick inserted with a glance at Sherrie that Ann couldn’t quite read.

Sherrie looked blankly at Nick for a moment, then said, “Yes, of course. And now that I’ve met you, I’d better be getting back. Things are kind of hectic with the sheriff laid up with his broken leg. Bye, Ann.”

“Goodbye.” Ann watched as Nick walked Sherrie around to the driver’s side and closed the car door behind her, muttering something through the open window that Ann couldn’t quite catch. Why had Sherrie come out here? Ann wondered, not believing for a minute her story about wanting to meet her. There was more to it than that. But what?

Jealousy made no sense. If Nick had been interested in Sherrie, he would have hardly married Ann. Could Nick be in some kind of trouble with the law? The appalling thought surfaced only to be dismissed. That look Sherrie had given Nick hadn’t been adversarial. It had been…conspiratorial, Ann finally decided. She stifled a sigh. Yet another thing she didn’t understand and didn’t feel free to ask about.

“Where shall we start?” she asked when Sherrie drove away.

Nick looked around, as if trying to decide, then said, “The barns, I guess. Other than the original cabin, there isn’t much else to see. I mostly raise breeding stock, not beef cattle.”

“How old?” Ann asked, her interest caught.

Nick blinked. “What?”

“How old is the original cabin? For that matter, how old is the ranch?”

“They’re both about 150 years, although the ranch hasn’t been worked continuously. The first settlers were starved out. The original cabin is over there.” Nick gestured toward his left as they rounded the first barn, a relatively new, perfectly repaired building. Ann studied it curiously. Clearly Nick had spent what funds he had had on the barns, which made sense. If the ranch was to prosper, the stock’s needs had to be met first.

Ann turned to look, her nose wrinkling in shock as an appalling odor slapped her in the face.

“Snake likes to grow vegetables.” Nick noticed her expression.

“That’s not any rotting veggie I’ve ever smelled. It’s more like…”

“Fertilizer,” Nick supplied. “Aging horse manure, to be specific.”

“There are limits to this back-to-nature kick,” Ann muttered.

That manure pile had been there for as long as he’d owned the ranch, and getting rid of it simply because she objected to the smell would be bound to give Ann the idea that she could induce him to make other changes. He decided to ignore the comment, thinking it was best to go on.

“I want to show you Silas.” Nick moved toward a fenced area behind the barn. Ann followed him.

“Is Silas another hired hand?”

“No.” Nick put his fingers in his mouth and emitted an ear-piercing whistle. “Silas is my prize bull. He’s very temperamental and is not to be upset under any circumstances.”

Ann instinctively stepped back as a huge black animal emerged from the open barn door and trotted toward them. She gulped. As far as she was concerned, it would take a confirmed masochist to bother that thing.

“Don’t feed him,” Nick continued. “And don’t let him out of the fence. Despite what he thinks, he’s not a pet.”

“Turning him into a pet never crossed my mind,” Ann said earnestly. “I can guarantee you that I’ll give him a wide berth. Do you have any animals on the ranch that are more manageable? Like chickens or ducks or pigs?”

“Pigs!” Nick repeated in horror. “This is a ranch. We don’t do pigs.”

“Anyone brave enough to do that thing—” she nodded toward Silas, who was pushing against the fence in his eagerness to reach them “—should be brave enough to do pigs.”

“Pigs are for farmers. I’m a rancher.”

Ann opened her mouth and then closed it in the interest of harmony. It sounded like rank bigotry to her, but pointing out the fact would not be helpful to her goal of getting to know Nick.

“Right, no pigs,” she said. “So what else do you have on a ranch besides oversized cows and manure piles?”

“Horses,” Nick offered, wondering if she were regretting her decision to marry him already.

He walked through an open door into the dim interior of the larger of the two barns with Ann right behind him. She sniffed curiously. The barn smelled of hay and animals and other more elusive scents. But they weren’t unpleasant scents, just different.

“Most of the horses are out to pasture, but my mount is in the stall over here.”

Ann leaned over the end of the wooden stall. It contained a large brown horse who lifted his head to look at her. Bits of hay were sticking out of his velvety-looking lips, and he studied her with soft, brown eyes.

“What’s his name?”

“Joe.”

“He’s got kind eyes.” Ann tentatively petted him.

So does she, Nick thought as he watched the hazel hue of her eyes deepen when Joe nickered in pleasure at her caress. Nick’s eyes were drawn to the stroking movement of Ann’s fingers as they slowly moved over Joe’s neck. What would it be like to have her touch him like that? The unexpected thought popped into his mind. To have her hands stroking over his bare chest? He tensed as a wave of longing slammed through him.

“I always wanted to have a horse,” Ann confided. “Ever since I was about seven and read Black Beauty. ”

Nick used patting Joe as an excuse to move closer to her. A tantalizing whiff of the perfume she was wearing teased his nostrils, and he fought the impulse to put his arms around her. To pull her up against him. To bury his face against her smooth skin and deeply breathe in the heady fragrance.

“There’s no reason you can’t learn to ride.” His voice was husky with the longings coloring his thoughts. “Joe won’t mind.”

Nick opened the door of the stall, slipped inside and saddled Joe with fingers that felt clumsy. He just hoped that Ann didn’t notice. A quick glance at her both reassured and annoyed him. She was concentrating on the horse, not him.

When he finally got the saddle adjusted, he led Joe out into the open barnyard.

Ann hurried after him, pausing uncertainly when she reached his side. This close, Joe seemed to be much bigger than he had been in the barn. She shifted from one foot to the other. Didn’t they have anything on this ranch that came in a small size?

“Up you go,” Nick ordered.

Ann looked from the ground to the stirrup to the saddle, and then back down at her feet. “How?” she finally asked.

“Put your left foot in the stirrup, grab hold of the saddle and pull yourself up.”

Ann took a deep breath and followed his directions. It didn’t turn out to be that easy. She wound up half on and half off, hanging on to the pommel of the saddle for dear life.

“Pull yourself up,” Nick said.

Ann gritted her teeth in frustration, embarrassed at seeming so inept. “If I could do that, I wouldn’t be dangling here,” she said tightly.

To her shock, Nick put his hands on her hips and gave her a shove. Ann awkwardly scrambled up into the saddle. Her flesh seemed to burn where he’d touched her, and she could still feel the imprint of his hard fingers. She wiggled slightly, trying to dispel the sensation, and forced herself to focus on the riding lesson.

“Now what?” Her voice came out high and breathless sounding.

“Squeeze your legs together and Joe will move.”

Ann obediently tightened her legs, and Joe took off at a brisk walk. Ann jerked backward, yanking on the reins. Joe came to a sudden stop, and she pitched forward against his neck.

“This isn’t as easy as it looks on television,” she muttered.

“Perhaps I can help until you get your balance.” Before she realized what he intended to do, Nick swung up behind her with a lithe grace that she envied. Ann gulped as he reached around her and took the reins. She could feel the muscles of his forearms pushing into her rib cage, and he was pressed against her from hip to shoulder. His body felt hot, stiflingly hot, and the heat was beginning to affect her, loosening her muscles and making them soft and pliable. She licked her lips, trying to regain control. She felt as if she were getting a lesson in frustration, not riding.

“Try to relax and move with the horse’s gait.” Nick’s breath warmed the skin on her neck, sending a cascade of shivers over her.

Relax! Ann thought incredulously. She was wound tightly enough to break, and he wanted her to relax!

Nick purposefully took a deep breath, forcing his chest closer to her. His gut clenched in reaction, and he could feel his body hardening. He wanted to nuzzle the soft white skin beneath her ear. To nibble her lips. To press his own to them and force them apart.

He squarely faced the fact that he wanted to go to bed with her. No, not wanted. That was a take-it-or-leave-it feeling. This was stronger than that. Much stronger. He craved sex with her.

Why shouldn’t he? He was married to her. Sex was part of marriage, he rationalized. So why not indulge his senses?

But what had happened the last time he’d lost his head over a woman? The chilling thought intruded. He’d been sucked into a disastrous situation that had ended in a very acrimonious divorce.

Ann wiggled slightly, and he lost his train of thought at the feel of her soft behind pressing into his groin. He couldn’t stand this! It had been so long since he’d had a woman. Over ten years—and until Ann had arrived, the lack had been no more than a minor inconvenience. But now…

This time would be different, he tried to convince himself. This time he wasn’t wallowing in overheated hormones and calling it love. This time he was in control of both his emotions and the situation and he would remain in control. All he had to do was make sure that he maintained an emotional distance from her. He swallowed as she lurched backward, hitting his chest. But not a physical distance. In fact, he wanted nothing so much as to eliminate all physical distance as soon as possible.

But how? It was a disquieting question. How did he bring up the subject of going to bed with her? He walked Joe around the barnyard in a wide circle while he pondered the problem, but he couldn’t think of a single graceful way of asking her to go to bed with him without first making a lot of emotional promises that he had no intention of keeping.

Joe stopped of his own accord as they approached the open barn door. Nick slowly swung out of the saddle and looked back up at Ann. Her eyes were gleaming with pleasure, and her soft lips were curved in a triumphant smile at her ride. An unexpected feeling of tenderness engulfed him, and he opened his mouth, intending to say something sophisticated and witty. To his horror, what emerged was neither.

“I have no objections to having sex with you,” he said, and then froze in stunned disbelief as he heard his bald words echo through the air.

Three

No objections to having sex with her! The destructive words sliced through Ann’s mind, lacerating her already battered self-confidence. Not even the sop of telling her that he found her attractive and wouldn’t object to getting to know her better. Just a bald “I wouldn’t mind having sex with you.” As if she were a convenience to be used to alleviate his needs with no acknowledgment that she might have feelings and needs of her own.

Was that all she was ever to be to the men in her life? Ann felt chill fingers of despair wrap themselves around her heart. When they eased, hopelessness rushed in to fill the void. She clenched her teeth against an overwhelming urge to burst into tears, refusing to let Nick see just how damaging she had found his words.

Her frantic gaze swung around the barren barnyard. She had to escape. To find a hiding place where she could painfully piece together the tattered remnants of her composure. Acting on instinct, she swung her leg over the horse and half fell, half jumped out of the saddle, only to wind up sprawled on the ground underneath Joe.

Ann bit her lip against the hysterical laughter bubbling up in her throat. The final straw would be if Joe were to step on her.

“That’s not the way to get off a horse.” Nick grabbed her beneath her armpits and hauled her to her feet with effortless ease. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he warned.

He was worried she’d hurt herself? Ann thought incredulously. When he’d already delivered a knockout blow to her fragile sense of worth as a woman? At least broken bones and bruises healed. She wasn’t sure that her emotions would ever feel whole again.

“Um, about what I said…What I meant was that I wouldn’t…I mean…we are married and…”

Nick’s garbled words slowly filtered through the miasma of unhappiness that surrounded her, and Ann forced herself to look at him. The muscles along his jaw were corded and there was a dull red flush underlying his deep tan. As if…he were embarrassed?

The unexpected idea shook Ann free from her own feelings long enough to consider his. Could his offer be the result of embarrassment at the necessity of articulating his emotional needs, rather than a lack of respect or interest in her as a person? It was possible, she conceded. She didn’t know him well enough to be able to say.

All Maggie had told her about Nick were bare facts. Facts about his emotionally starved childhood, facts about his disastrous first marriage, facts about his problems in dealing with the unexpected arrival of his daughter. What Maggie hadn’t been able to tell her was how those facts had shaped him emotionally. How they had shaped his thought processes. She would have to figure that out for herself.

Which left her where? Ann tried to think. Her brand-new husband had suggested that he wouldn’t be averse to having sex with her. She didn’t like the fact that he was thinking in terms of sex while she thought in terms of making love, but maybe that was the way men thought.

A discouraged sigh escaped her. What she didn’t know about men in general and this man in particular would fill a book.

“But, of course, if you don’t…” Nick responded to what he thought was the reason for her sigh. “I mean I can understand that you might not…”

Ann found his disjointed words somehow comforting. He didn’t appear to be any more sure of himself than she was. In fact, if anything, he seemed to be virtually inarticulate when it came to expressing his emotions.

“It isn’t that I don’t want to…” Ann refused to say “have sex” because it sounded so impersonal and dehumanizing, but she didn’t want to say “make love” for fear that he might think that she expected more from him than he had to give. “It’s just that I don’t know you very well and…that’s so…personal,” she finally muttered.

“Not necessarily.” Nick’s bitter tone shocked her. “How about if we leave it for the time being, and when you feel you know me well enough, you tell me and we can take it from there.”

“Okay,” Ann said weakly, trying to envision a set of circumstances where she walked up to Nick and told him she wanted to go to bed with him. To pull off that kind of bluntness took more sophistication than she possessed— than she was ever likely to possess.

“Good.” Nick’s voice sounded overly hearty to Ann. “Now that we’ve settled that, I’d better go help Snake check out the fencing.”

“What about lunch?” she asked as he swung back up into the saddle.

“Snake always brings sandwiches for both of us. It saves us the time of coming back to the ranch. I’ll be back for dinner about five.” Turning Joe around, he headed toward the pasture behind the house at a brisk trot.

Ann watched him until he was out of sight, and then she turned back to the house.

She was fast coming to the conclusion that she hadn’t solved her problems by marrying Nick, she’d simply exchanged one set for another. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t eventually solve them, she assured herself, trying hard to believe it. She was a bright, educated woman of the nineties. Surely she could think of some way to turn their marriage into a viable one. Preferably before Nick’s daughter arrived on the scene. It was going to be hard enough trying to hammer out some kind of relationship with Nick on her own, but to try to do it under the watchful eye of a teenager who might well be hostile…

She needed to get organized, Ann told herself. To come up with a solid plan. To direct events along the lines she wanted them to go instead of simply reacting to what Nick did.

Ann shoved open the back door in determination. She knew it wasn’t going to be easy. She was hampered by both her own innate shyness and Nick’s bone-deep reserve. Her gut feeling was that Nick was never going to be comfortable expressing his feelings. But when she remembered how eloquent her first husband had been about how much she had meant to him—and how every word of it had been a lie—she wasn’t sure she minded Nick’s reticence.

And in the meantime, there was plenty she could do. She walked into the living room and looked around with a jaundiced eye. A combination of litter and dust covered every square inch of every available surface, and dust bunnies were colonizing the corners.

She shook her head in disgust. It would take days to correct what looked like years of neglect. But the nice thing about cleaning was that it would leave her mind free, she thought in satisfaction. Free to plan out the specifics of her campaign.

* * *

When Ann staggered out of bed at five-thirty the following morning in response to the alarm’s jarring summons, she was buoyed by a feeling of cautious optimism. Thanks to a great deal of hard thought, she now had a cohesive plan of action and its structure gave her a budding sense of security—of something to hold on to in the strange new world she found herself in.