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Synopsis
SHE YEARNED FOR EXCITEMENT Mariah Rose's innocent fantasies of the wild west didn't prepare the British beauty for the man she saw barreling out of the Texas brush -- splendidly tall, overpoweringly masculine...and naked as the day he was born! Then the arrogant scoundrel had the audacity to appoint himself her gallant protector! He obviously had more than protecting her in mind, and Mariah steeled herself against his lusty charm. But it was impossible to keep her distance in this untamed paradise...especially when she found herself burning for his demanding kisses and yearning for his seductive caress! HE ACHED FOR HER EMBRACE The delectable Mariah enticed Whitman Reagor as no woman ever had -- and the virile rancher had sampled the delights of many! But this time honor demanded that he resist temptation. He swore he'd escort the English enchantress safely across the rugged plains without touching a hair on her silken head. But when the curvaceous red head stole into his bed one moonlit evening, he couldn't resist taking what she so willingly offered. He would learn all the secrets of her creamy flesh, savor the sweetness of her ruby lips...and share a lifetime's worth of loving with his Wild Texas Rose.
Release date: January 1, 1990
Publisher: Zebra Books
Print pages: 448
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Wild Texas Rose
Martha Hix
March 1883
Naked as the day he was born, a tall lean man barreled out of a modest house, into the crisp dawn and onto the dirt street–deserted except for one spectator.
Mariah McGuire, a birdcage clutched in her gloved hand, averted her farsighted brown eyes, but found herself staring once more. Standing less than a quarter block away, she was taken aback by the fracas, even more so when a wild-haired blonde, wearing a wrapper and wielding a skillet, darted out of the same door in pursuit of the man. Obviously all hell had broken loose on a back street in Dublin, Texas.
Mariah halted. Never in her twenty-three years had she witnessed a domestic squabble as improper as this, though she had been around more than her share of her parents’ arguments.
“Dammit, woman.” The man’s voice was strangely calm as he quizzed the shapely woman gripping the cast-iron weapon. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“You, that’s what. You’re just like all the rest. You ain’t interested in nothin’ but gettin’ between my legs!”
Mariah rolled her eyes. Texas was a wild and woolly place, and Texans were a breed all their own. That she had learned from her travels across the state, first by train from Galveston to Lampasas, then by stagecoach from there.
“I’ve heard enough of your empty promises, Whit Reagor,” she heard the brassy blonde screech.
“Promises? I never make promises I don’t intend to keep.”
“Shut up!” The blonde hurled the skillet at the man. “You never had no intention of marrying me, so get gone and stay gone!”
The missile thwacked against his broad right shoulder, and Mariah flinched. The indecent Mr. Reagor didn’t move a muscle. His wildcat assailant dusted her palms and pranced back into the house, the door banging behind her.
He whipped around, charged toward the domicile, and pounded the heel of a fist against the barrier. “At least give me my clothes.”
“Your behind’s been nekkid all night, so why get stove up about it now?” the woman yelled from inside the house.
“Heavens,” Mariah uttered, trying to disregard the loud voices and continued thumping on the door.
She started walking again. How nice it would be to reach the gentility of her new home in Trick’em. Though the town was only four days’ travel from here, the connecting stagecoach wouldn’t depart for three more days.
“Barbara,” Whit Reagor said sternly, “if you think I’m going to prance round in the altogether, you’ve got another think coming. Open the door before I break it down.”
Though she was embarrassed for the two combatants as well as for herself, Mariah felt strangely compelled to halt again. She watched the blonde hoist a window sash, then toss a petticoat at the man’s face. The garment was as stark-purple as the hair on Whit Reagor’s head and chest was starkly black.
“Try that on for size, you snake in the grass!” the angered female demanded, her challenge punctuated by the window slamming shut.
“Women,” the man muttered, shaking his head.
He shrugged one wide shoulder, held the shiny undergarment aloft momentarily before casually covering his lower midsection. As if he had nary a problem, he turned toward the street–and Mariah Rose McGuire.
From the distance of no more than fifteen feet, she caught the lift of an ebony brow. A smirk stretched his mouth. Why, he didn’t even appear humiliated.
Even though her parrot issued trilling protests to the approaching stranger, Mariah held her ground. No brazen Texan, even one as fine-looking as this man, was going to send her scurrying for cover.
“How doin’, ma’am?”
No reply passed her grim lips. She was headed for Widow Atherton’s boarding establishment, even if it meant passing the crudest, most disreputable man she had ever encountered. Mariah lifted her nose as well as the birdcage clutched in her gloved hand, and started again on her intended path.
“Hey, lady, don’t be hasty. Wait up,” the man called from behind her. “You there with the auburn hair and the parrot. Wait up, pretty lady.”
Mariah ignored the pleas, and took ten more steps.
“lady?”
Seemingly pleased with himself, her parrot mocked over and over, “Lady, lady!”
Gritting her teeth, she admonished, “Hush, Gus.”
She glanced over her shoulder and detected that the man was not more than five feet away. Blessed with a head for sums, she calculated him to be a half foot taller than herself, which would make him at least six two. Handsome described him in a word, ruggedly handsome in two. His bright blue eyes contrasted with his olive complexion and dark hair, hair that was curly and short-cropped above clipped sideburns. Whereas Joseph was thin, short, and pale, this man was anything but.
She shook off the comparisons, turned her head, and kept walking. Joseph deserved more than unfair comparisons. He was her savior. Aggrieved over losing so many of her loved ones–first Lawrence, then her mother and grandmother–she had been without hope for the future. At twenty-three, she was too old to make a suitable marriage and too repressed by her father to follow her dreams. But the Viscount Desmont had changed all that.
He offered his love, and in exchange asked for nothing more than her hand. Quite unlike her father, who had hectored in his mélange of English and French, “No femme in her right mind wants anything beyond mariage and, as long as I draw a breath, I won’t have ye wasting yer life with schoolteaching,” Joseph understood her aspirations.
And he, a member of one of England’s oldest and most noble families, had renounced every birthright privilege to offer his name to a connetable’s spinster daughter from a lesser part of the British Empire–a spinster who had allowed him liberties with her body. She was fortunate he hadn’t cast her aside in favor of a more virtuous woman.
It was her duty to repay Joseph for his sacrifices. But didn’t he deserve something better than a wife who felt nothing beyond obligation?
She wished Joseph hadn’t made so many sacrifices. When her grief over her losses had started to heal, she had been wracked with doubts about the future. Yet what could she do? There was nothing left for her in Guernsey–nothing but a father who thwarted her ambitions.
No longer was she under Logan McGuire’s thumb, but she’d solved one problem to take on another. After leaving the isolated island home that was nearer to France than to England, Mariah had had her first taste of freedom, and it had gone down smooth as thick Guernsey cream. If not for her approaching marriage, she’d have been free to do as she pleased here in Texas. Dash it, she was enjoying her independence!
“For Pete’s sake, lady! Wait up. You don’t have to be afraid. I’m not out to rob you of anything!”
Whit Reagor’s shouted words brought Mariah back to the present. Strange, she thought, that he hadn’t raised his voice to the blonde. “Sir, are you addressing me?”
“You’re the only person on this street except for me,” he replied in a deep baritone, a grin dimpling the right side of his tanned, stubble-shadowed face, “so I reckon I am.”
While a gust of wind tugged at her hatpins, she took a hesitant look at him. He was covering himself–partially–with the petticoat. Mariah noted his blue lips, then her line of sight lowered, and she scrutinized his narrow hips, his long hairy–shivering–legs. My, those legs were nicely formed. The sight of them played havoc with her senses.
“Like what you see?”
Ignoring his question and marshaling her wits, she lifted her gaze. “What do you want?”
“Help.”
Should she get involved? The blonde might have right on her side, Mariah thought, but she was protected by wrapper and roof, while Whit Reagor was bare to the frigid elements. Putting herself in any charitable person’s place, she said, “Let’s find some privacy. I’m sure your lady friend is watching us.”
The man at her heel, she aimed for a grove of live oak trees a half block away. Privacy assured, she whipped around and nearly collided with his towering frame. “Be kind enough to say your piece.”
His indigo-blue eyes twinkled as he apparently ignored her request. “Say, Red, bet you’re not from round these parts. Your accent is different, mainly English, but sorta ... hmm. . . French?”
“I am not addressed as ‘Red.’ ” Having no intention of explaining her Norman French and Scots Irish heritage, she gave him a haughty onceover, which she regretted immediately. One shouldn’t do that sort of thing in front of a nude man.
“Many pardons, ma’am.” A tease in his tone, he changed the subject again. “My money says you’ve never got a gander at a naked man before.”
Mariah placed the parrot cage on the ground, and stepped to the oak tree. How true. Though she had four brothers, they had kept themselves covered in her presence. And that night with Joseph ... he hadn’t uncovered himself, as near as she could remember.
She shuddered. There were, her now departed mother had told her, certain things a woman was forced to endure. “When you go to the marriage bed, Daughter, close your eyes and think of England,” Anne du Moulin McGuire had advised. This one and only piece of advice concerning the union between men and women had proved to be prudent. On the night Mariah and Joseph had toasted their future and had drunk too much champagne to his bon voyage, she had closed her eyes, both in distaste and boredom. And when she awoke, turning back had been impossible.
Whatever spark there might have been for Joseph had fizzled that night, and she dreaded the marriage bed. After all, a woman couldn’t drink herself into oblivion every night of her wedded life.
The Texan broke into her brown study by saying, “I shouldn’t have mentioned nudity to a lady. Forgive me.”
Mariah pulled herself together. “It’s not the state of your undress that’s disturbing, sir. It’s the state of your affairs. That poor woman is quite distressed. Shouldn’t you try to make amends?”
He shrugged. Clutching the purple petticoat even closer to his private parts, he shortened the distance between them. “Barbara’s a little hot-tempered. She’ll get over it.”
Now that Whit Reagor was close by, she got an eyeful of his scarred, hair-whorled chest. How did he get those scars? This thought was replaced by another one. It was an odd yet nice feeling to be eye-to-chest level with a man.
Mariah gathered her wits and responded to his statement. “My sympathies are with your lady.”
“She needs condolences like a boar needs teats.”
A flush rising in her cheeks, Mariah curled her lip. “Your crudity is only outweighed by your gall.”
“Been known to happen.” He glanced down, then up. The dimple in his right cheek deepened. “But can’t you see I’m in a fix? Can’t go sashayin’ round in the altogether, Mrs.... um... you’re Mrs.... ?”
“Miss,” she amended. “And it would serve you right, sashaying round in the–” She laughed at the ludicrous situation. “Oh, heavens, take this.”
Mariah whipped the knee-length cloak from her shoulders. “This will cover you much better than”–her finger pointed to the petticoat, her eyes traveling to his wickedly handsome face–“that garment.”
“Petticoat,” he corrected, his grin widening. Clumsily he maneuvered his left hand to fit her gray woolen cloak around his shoulders. “It’s a purple petticoat.”
She imagined herself wearing such a damson-plum-colored undergarment. My, it’s lovely, isn’t it? she thought, but realized she’d voiced the question when he said, “Depends on who’s wearing it.” He winked boldly, dropped the blonde’s highly personal wear to the street, and took two steps closer. “I’d bet my spread out west of here that you’ve never seen a purple petticoat before.”
On guard again, perhaps because he was correct, she snapped, “What gives you the audacity to say that?”
“My crudity is only outweighed by my gall.” His retort mocked her earlier words. “That aside, the way I see it, there are two kinds of women–ladies and lovers. From the scowl on that pretty face of yours and the blush in your cheeks, I’ll bet you’re the former.”
She grabbed her reticule and parrot. “I’ve tarried too long. Leave the cloak at the Double Inn.”
She grimaced, remembering the previous sleepless night. Her stay at Dublin’s stagecoach stop had been less than pleasant, thus forcing her to find quieter accommodations. Nevertheless, she had no desire to acquaint Whit Reagor with her prospective temporary residence, the Atherton home. She had seen more than enough of Mr. Whit Reagor.
“Leave it for Miss McGuire, please. Good day, sir.”
“Sir, sir!” Gus squawked.
“Whoa there, Miss McGuire. Don’t leave just yet.” Whit cocked his head. “If you wouldn’t mind, ma’am, could I trouble you some more?”
“What now?” she asked in exasperation.
“If I’m seen like this,” he said, in a first show of humility, “I’ll be the laughingstock of four counties.”
A measure of her instinctive humor returned, and she chuckled. His very human reaction to possible ridicule was strangely endearing. “Actually, not the laughingstock you would’ve been if I hadn’t passed by.”
“Got me on that one,” he conceded, leaning a shoulder against a tree trunk. “Well, what’s it gonna be? Will you or will you not take a message across town?”
She shifted her weight to the other foot. “I will.”
“Good girl, sweet angel of mercy. And I thank you.”
For the first time she heard, really heard, the vibrating quality to his tone. Nice, so nice. Before she could settle her confusion, he leaned forward to brush the side of his roughened forefinger against her cheek, eliciting an involuntary quiver from Mariah.
Startled, she gazed into the ink-blue of his eyes. Gone was the arrogance, the impertinence. There was a look of undeniable interest.
Was his expression reflected in her brown eyes? Fearing so, and confused by her emotions, she stepped back. “You’d best give me directions.”
“I’d love to,” he murmured. “Ah . . . um ... my sister lives on Comanche Street. Tell her I need help. Clothes, and quick.” He went on to explain, “She runs a boardinghouse, only one in town. You can’t miss the sign. Lois Atherton is her name.”
Oh, no! They were certain to meet again, and Mariah, as a consequence of being too sheltered in spite of her advanced years, felt awkward. How would she handle the situation?
“One more thing,” he said. “What’s your given name?”
Allowing familiarity was neither proper nor prudent. “Miss McGuire is all you need.”
All he needed? She might be right. Heart hammering, Whit watched her go. The elegantly beautiful Miss McGuire could fill a blatant desire, no doubt about that. Her shapely body, her burnt-auburn hair, her milk-chocolate-colored eyes got to him.
It hadn’t taken him long to figure out she wasn’t wearing a corset, and didn’t need one. She was by no means petite, but that type never appealed to him, anyway. He liked his women on the tall side.
Beyond that, he was fascinated by her frosty airs which had rivaled the blue norther whipping across his cloak-clad body. When her ice had defrosted a bit, though, he had liked her even better. He got the idea there was one helluva warm woman beneath that glacial exterior. His kind of woman.
Damn. What was the matter with him? Miss McGuire was a lady, not a trollop. And ladies meant trouble. Parsons and babies’ breath and wedding rings.
Whit didn’t believe in marriage. Not since his wife had wound up dead in the burned-out ruins of their home. Dead, naked, and in the arms of another man, the man he had thought to be his best friend.
His top teeth ground against the bottom ones. He had learned his lesson about women on the quick side, and it stayed with him. Sixteen years had passed since Jenny had made him a cuckold, but no woman had played him for a besotted fool since then or would in the future.
Whit glanced at the cloudless sky, the sight shifting his thoughts to a more immediate problem. His hundred-section spread hadn’t had a drop of rain in months. The creeks were drying up. Of course, it was early in what should have been the rainy season, so the situation might right itself, but Whit was concerned; concerned enough that he intended, as soon as he got back to the ranch, to dam the spring-fed creek along the south pasture.
Whit had another worry. Joe Jaye. The stubborn farmer had continued his fence-stringing. So far, Whit had kept angry cattlemen from the tenderfoot’s fences, but how much longer would that hold?
These things preying on his mind, Whit shouldn’t be daydreaming about women. Correction. Woman. His mind’s eye kept drawing pictures of womanly allure. Miss McGuire. Will you ever see her again? a voice echoed within him. Well, he did have her cloak ...
He decided to make a point of looking her up.
“Well, I’m not surprised.” Lois Atherton, whom Mariah guessed to be about forty, shook her head of dark curls. “But I never figured it would take this long for Barbara to toss him on his hind end.”
Lois stopped hoeing the newly planted vegetable garden behind her clapboard boardinghouse. “Women are always gettin’ riled at my brother.”
Mariah wasn’t astounded at these frank words. During her travels from the Gulf Coast to west central Texas, she had experienced a great deal of Texas-style candor. In fact, she was beginning to believe nothing further could shock her anymore.
“They fall for Whit . . .” Lois clapped her hands to scare away a huge tabby cat that was eyeing Gus as if he were a joint of Sunday beef. “Scat, Fancy!”
While moving the parrot cage closer to her side, Mariah cast a menacing glare at the sharp-eyed feline.
“As I was saying,” Lois admitted, “Whit never sees fit to call a preacher and buy the ring.”
“Maybe he hasn’t met the right woman.”
“Hmmph.”
“Perhaps luck just hasn’t been with him.”
“You may be right.” Lois lifted a palm. “But I doubt it. You’ve heard the expression ‘once bitten, twice shy’? Well, that about sums up Whit’s problem.”
She assumed his sister would admit more about Whit Reagor, but Mariah didn’t press the subject, even though she was curious. For some odd reason, he hadn’t left her thoughts since their inauspicious meeting. Hair as black as a dark night, blue eyes tinged with dark gray, height tall enough to make her feel short ... He was like no man she had ever met before, not even Lawrence, but ...
Why couldn’t she be practical? Despite the memories of that wretched night in the shadows of Castle Cornet, where her virginity had been claimed, Joseph was the man for her.
Lois brushed her palms down the front of her gingham apron. “The ‘right’ women don’t perch in saloons. ’Course, if he’d tie up with ladies instead of strumpets, the story might be different.”
“He p-pays ladies to . . .” Had it been only minutes earlier when she’d thought nothing further could shock her?
“Whit? Ha! He doesn’t have to pay. Not to say he isn’t generous.” Lois yanked a weed from a mounded row. “Buys his gals trunkful after trunkful of fancy duds just for the pleasure of strippin’ those duds off their backs.”
Mariah blushed again, something she seemed to do often where Whit Reagor was concerned. Though she had tried her best to adjust to life in this often bewildering land, she was a product of her Calvinistic background. The females of Guernsey didn’t discuss men they barely knew, much less bedroom intimacies.
As for the man in question, here she was chattering with his sister while he waited to be rescued. “Mrs. Atherton, your brother is waiting for your help.”
Lois lifted a palm in an air of dismissal. “Aw, it’ll do him good to cool his heels awhile.”
A gust of air blew.
“Oh, all right. I’ll rescue the jackanapes. Come on in the house. Gotta fetch his clothes. Better bring that bird of yours. No tellin’ what Fancy might do.” The proprietress took off for the house. “I keep a room just off the kitchen for Whit, not that he uses it for much.” Short of the back porch, she said, “Too bad he’s too old to turn across my checkered apron. I’d teach him a lesson or two.”
Mariah grinned. Imagining that rough-and-tumble Texan–a man probably in his late thirties! –turned over an aproned lap was rather humorous to imagine.
Cage in hand, she followed Lois inside. The kitchen was toast-warm from the iron Chandler stove, and the scent of bacon and the soda bread Texans called biscuits filled her nostrils to remind her of the breakfast skipped at the Double Inn.
As if she sensed Mariah’s hunger, Lois offered, “There’s a plate under that cloth. Grab yourself a bite.”
“Oh, I can’t take someone’s food.”
“I was saving it for Whit. Always do when he’s in town.” The words had a wistful quality to them, but they were replaced with her former tone. “Usually feed it to the chickens, though. Go on, girl, eat up! If he’s hungry after I fetch him, I’ll fry up a half-dozen eggs.” Lois winked. “No matter how mad I get at Whit, I wouldn’t let the baby of the family go hungry.”
Underneath the brusque attitude toward her brother, Mariah believed Lois loved him very much. He did, she realized, have a way with women. Without a doubt, the man was spoiled rotten.
As the older woman disappeared into the room adjoining the cooking room, Mariah set her reticule on the table, lifted the cloth, and reached for one of the salty-pork, butter-dripping biscuits. Heaven’s! The staple diet for this frontier state, beans and fried-to-shoe-leather beef, had begun to get tiresome. But, she reminded herself, everyday life would be rosy after reaching Joseph’s estate.
She dabbed the linen cloth to her lips and fed crumbs to Gus. “Thank you,” she called to the adjoining room.
“Come on in here where I can hear you proper.”
Mariah found Lois Atherton folding a chambray shirt into a valise. The room smelled of leather and tobacco. Trousers, shirts, and a buckskin jacket hung from hooks in the wall. A cartridge belt lay on the oak bureau. Though she remembered Whit Reagor saying he had a “spread out west,” she wondered if he was a gunslinger. After all, there were those translucent-white scars on his upper body. She knew what they looked like, but how would it feel to touch them ... ?
Ashamed of her caprice, Mariah considered the gunbelt. Surely he wasn’t a gunslinger; her imagining him so had been the result of too many traveling hours spent reading too many dime novels. After all, her own reticule held a revolver, which didn’t make her an outlaw.
“My purpose for being here is twofold,” Mariah said, determined to get down to business. “I’m waiting for the Yuma stage, so I’ll be needing accommodations. Mrs. Watson at the inn said you might rent me a room.”
“I don’t board nobody lest I know something’ about them. Said you’re headin’ for Yuma, right?” Not waiting for an answer, she continued. “That’s a long ways for a woman alone to travel. Tell me about yourself.”
Mariah made explanations of her island homeland.
“So what is a lady from Guernsey doin’ in Dublin, Texas?”
“I’m on my way to a calling. Schoolteaching.”
Lois’s look was wary as she grabbed a pair of worn yet shiny boots. “I never figured you for a schoolmarm.”
“Well, I am, and I’m proud of it.”
“How’d you come to be a schoolmarm?”
Running her palm across a polished oak bureau, Mariah thought about an answer, and decided on the truth. “Actually, I’m not a full-fledged teacher as yet.”
“I see. But you still haven’t told me why.”
“I traveled to London when I was seventeen, and my heart went out to the street urchins. They seemed so hopeless.”
Mariah wouldn’t admit feeling a kinship toward those children. The hurt was too deep. If she lived to be a hundred, she’d never forget the long years of her miserable childhood yearning for her father’s affection.
Hopelessness she was well acquainted with. And she needed to be needed.
Though she had long given up on Logan McGuire, she had left him a letter on the day of leaving St. Peter Port. She’d spelled out her frustrations and anger. But she’d signed it with love. Did one ever not love a father, no matter how difficult he might be?
Lois asked, “Don’t they need teachers in Guernsey?”
“Of course, but–”
“You’d have to be ugly, which you’re not, if you’ve crossed the Atlantic just to force the three Rs down younguns’ throats. Must be another reason.”
Her mind not on Joseph, Mariah could have told her about Lawrence, but didn’t. With unseeing eyes, she pretended to study a paperweight. For years she had loved the dashing lieutenant. At eighteen, she had met him and her head was never turned by any other Guernseyman from then on. Her feelings for him had been so strong that she’d pushed aside her teaching aspirations, for all she’d needed to make her life co. . .
Naked as the day he was born, a tall lean man barreled out of a modest house, into the crisp dawn and onto the dirt street–deserted except for one spectator.
Mariah McGuire, a birdcage clutched in her gloved hand, averted her farsighted brown eyes, but found herself staring once more. Standing less than a quarter block away, she was taken aback by the fracas, even more so when a wild-haired blonde, wearing a wrapper and wielding a skillet, darted out of the same door in pursuit of the man. Obviously all hell had broken loose on a back street in Dublin, Texas.
Mariah halted. Never in her twenty-three years had she witnessed a domestic squabble as improper as this, though she had been around more than her share of her parents’ arguments.
“Dammit, woman.” The man’s voice was strangely calm as he quizzed the shapely woman gripping the cast-iron weapon. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“You, that’s what. You’re just like all the rest. You ain’t interested in nothin’ but gettin’ between my legs!”
Mariah rolled her eyes. Texas was a wild and woolly place, and Texans were a breed all their own. That she had learned from her travels across the state, first by train from Galveston to Lampasas, then by stagecoach from there.
“I’ve heard enough of your empty promises, Whit Reagor,” she heard the brassy blonde screech.
“Promises? I never make promises I don’t intend to keep.”
“Shut up!” The blonde hurled the skillet at the man. “You never had no intention of marrying me, so get gone and stay gone!”
The missile thwacked against his broad right shoulder, and Mariah flinched. The indecent Mr. Reagor didn’t move a muscle. His wildcat assailant dusted her palms and pranced back into the house, the door banging behind her.
He whipped around, charged toward the domicile, and pounded the heel of a fist against the barrier. “At least give me my clothes.”
“Your behind’s been nekkid all night, so why get stove up about it now?” the woman yelled from inside the house.
“Heavens,” Mariah uttered, trying to disregard the loud voices and continued thumping on the door.
She started walking again. How nice it would be to reach the gentility of her new home in Trick’em. Though the town was only four days’ travel from here, the connecting stagecoach wouldn’t depart for three more days.
“Barbara,” Whit Reagor said sternly, “if you think I’m going to prance round in the altogether, you’ve got another think coming. Open the door before I break it down.”
Though she was embarrassed for the two combatants as well as for herself, Mariah felt strangely compelled to halt again. She watched the blonde hoist a window sash, then toss a petticoat at the man’s face. The garment was as stark-purple as the hair on Whit Reagor’s head and chest was starkly black.
“Try that on for size, you snake in the grass!” the angered female demanded, her challenge punctuated by the window slamming shut.
“Women,” the man muttered, shaking his head.
He shrugged one wide shoulder, held the shiny undergarment aloft momentarily before casually covering his lower midsection. As if he had nary a problem, he turned toward the street–and Mariah Rose McGuire.
From the distance of no more than fifteen feet, she caught the lift of an ebony brow. A smirk stretched his mouth. Why, he didn’t even appear humiliated.
Even though her parrot issued trilling protests to the approaching stranger, Mariah held her ground. No brazen Texan, even one as fine-looking as this man, was going to send her scurrying for cover.
“How doin’, ma’am?”
No reply passed her grim lips. She was headed for Widow Atherton’s boarding establishment, even if it meant passing the crudest, most disreputable man she had ever encountered. Mariah lifted her nose as well as the birdcage clutched in her gloved hand, and started again on her intended path.
“Hey, lady, don’t be hasty. Wait up,” the man called from behind her. “You there with the auburn hair and the parrot. Wait up, pretty lady.”
Mariah ignored the pleas, and took ten more steps.
“lady?”
Seemingly pleased with himself, her parrot mocked over and over, “Lady, lady!”
Gritting her teeth, she admonished, “Hush, Gus.”
She glanced over her shoulder and detected that the man was not more than five feet away. Blessed with a head for sums, she calculated him to be a half foot taller than herself, which would make him at least six two. Handsome described him in a word, ruggedly handsome in two. His bright blue eyes contrasted with his olive complexion and dark hair, hair that was curly and short-cropped above clipped sideburns. Whereas Joseph was thin, short, and pale, this man was anything but.
She shook off the comparisons, turned her head, and kept walking. Joseph deserved more than unfair comparisons. He was her savior. Aggrieved over losing so many of her loved ones–first Lawrence, then her mother and grandmother–she had been without hope for the future. At twenty-three, she was too old to make a suitable marriage and too repressed by her father to follow her dreams. But the Viscount Desmont had changed all that.
He offered his love, and in exchange asked for nothing more than her hand. Quite unlike her father, who had hectored in his mélange of English and French, “No femme in her right mind wants anything beyond mariage and, as long as I draw a breath, I won’t have ye wasting yer life with schoolteaching,” Joseph understood her aspirations.
And he, a member of one of England’s oldest and most noble families, had renounced every birthright privilege to offer his name to a connetable’s spinster daughter from a lesser part of the British Empire–a spinster who had allowed him liberties with her body. She was fortunate he hadn’t cast her aside in favor of a more virtuous woman.
It was her duty to repay Joseph for his sacrifices. But didn’t he deserve something better than a wife who felt nothing beyond obligation?
She wished Joseph hadn’t made so many sacrifices. When her grief over her losses had started to heal, she had been wracked with doubts about the future. Yet what could she do? There was nothing left for her in Guernsey–nothing but a father who thwarted her ambitions.
No longer was she under Logan McGuire’s thumb, but she’d solved one problem to take on another. After leaving the isolated island home that was nearer to France than to England, Mariah had had her first taste of freedom, and it had gone down smooth as thick Guernsey cream. If not for her approaching marriage, she’d have been free to do as she pleased here in Texas. Dash it, she was enjoying her independence!
“For Pete’s sake, lady! Wait up. You don’t have to be afraid. I’m not out to rob you of anything!”
Whit Reagor’s shouted words brought Mariah back to the present. Strange, she thought, that he hadn’t raised his voice to the blonde. “Sir, are you addressing me?”
“You’re the only person on this street except for me,” he replied in a deep baritone, a grin dimpling the right side of his tanned, stubble-shadowed face, “so I reckon I am.”
While a gust of wind tugged at her hatpins, she took a hesitant look at him. He was covering himself–partially–with the petticoat. Mariah noted his blue lips, then her line of sight lowered, and she scrutinized his narrow hips, his long hairy–shivering–legs. My, those legs were nicely formed. The sight of them played havoc with her senses.
“Like what you see?”
Ignoring his question and marshaling her wits, she lifted her gaze. “What do you want?”
“Help.”
Should she get involved? The blonde might have right on her side, Mariah thought, but she was protected by wrapper and roof, while Whit Reagor was bare to the frigid elements. Putting herself in any charitable person’s place, she said, “Let’s find some privacy. I’m sure your lady friend is watching us.”
The man at her heel, she aimed for a grove of live oak trees a half block away. Privacy assured, she whipped around and nearly collided with his towering frame. “Be kind enough to say your piece.”
His indigo-blue eyes twinkled as he apparently ignored her request. “Say, Red, bet you’re not from round these parts. Your accent is different, mainly English, but sorta ... hmm. . . French?”
“I am not addressed as ‘Red.’ ” Having no intention of explaining her Norman French and Scots Irish heritage, she gave him a haughty onceover, which she regretted immediately. One shouldn’t do that sort of thing in front of a nude man.
“Many pardons, ma’am.” A tease in his tone, he changed the subject again. “My money says you’ve never got a gander at a naked man before.”
Mariah placed the parrot cage on the ground, and stepped to the oak tree. How true. Though she had four brothers, they had kept themselves covered in her presence. And that night with Joseph ... he hadn’t uncovered himself, as near as she could remember.
She shuddered. There were, her now departed mother had told her, certain things a woman was forced to endure. “When you go to the marriage bed, Daughter, close your eyes and think of England,” Anne du Moulin McGuire had advised. This one and only piece of advice concerning the union between men and women had proved to be prudent. On the night Mariah and Joseph had toasted their future and had drunk too much champagne to his bon voyage, she had closed her eyes, both in distaste and boredom. And when she awoke, turning back had been impossible.
Whatever spark there might have been for Joseph had fizzled that night, and she dreaded the marriage bed. After all, a woman couldn’t drink herself into oblivion every night of her wedded life.
The Texan broke into her brown study by saying, “I shouldn’t have mentioned nudity to a lady. Forgive me.”
Mariah pulled herself together. “It’s not the state of your undress that’s disturbing, sir. It’s the state of your affairs. That poor woman is quite distressed. Shouldn’t you try to make amends?”
He shrugged. Clutching the purple petticoat even closer to his private parts, he shortened the distance between them. “Barbara’s a little hot-tempered. She’ll get over it.”
Now that Whit Reagor was close by, she got an eyeful of his scarred, hair-whorled chest. How did he get those scars? This thought was replaced by another one. It was an odd yet nice feeling to be eye-to-chest level with a man.
Mariah gathered her wits and responded to his statement. “My sympathies are with your lady.”
“She needs condolences like a boar needs teats.”
A flush rising in her cheeks, Mariah curled her lip. “Your crudity is only outweighed by your gall.”
“Been known to happen.” He glanced down, then up. The dimple in his right cheek deepened. “But can’t you see I’m in a fix? Can’t go sashayin’ round in the altogether, Mrs.... um... you’re Mrs.... ?”
“Miss,” she amended. “And it would serve you right, sashaying round in the–” She laughed at the ludicrous situation. “Oh, heavens, take this.”
Mariah whipped the knee-length cloak from her shoulders. “This will cover you much better than”–her finger pointed to the petticoat, her eyes traveling to his wickedly handsome face–“that garment.”
“Petticoat,” he corrected, his grin widening. Clumsily he maneuvered his left hand to fit her gray woolen cloak around his shoulders. “It’s a purple petticoat.”
She imagined herself wearing such a damson-plum-colored undergarment. My, it’s lovely, isn’t it? she thought, but realized she’d voiced the question when he said, “Depends on who’s wearing it.” He winked boldly, dropped the blonde’s highly personal wear to the street, and took two steps closer. “I’d bet my spread out west of here that you’ve never seen a purple petticoat before.”
On guard again, perhaps because he was correct, she snapped, “What gives you the audacity to say that?”
“My crudity is only outweighed by my gall.” His retort mocked her earlier words. “That aside, the way I see it, there are two kinds of women–ladies and lovers. From the scowl on that pretty face of yours and the blush in your cheeks, I’ll bet you’re the former.”
She grabbed her reticule and parrot. “I’ve tarried too long. Leave the cloak at the Double Inn.”
She grimaced, remembering the previous sleepless night. Her stay at Dublin’s stagecoach stop had been less than pleasant, thus forcing her to find quieter accommodations. Nevertheless, she had no desire to acquaint Whit Reagor with her prospective temporary residence, the Atherton home. She had seen more than enough of Mr. Whit Reagor.
“Leave it for Miss McGuire, please. Good day, sir.”
“Sir, sir!” Gus squawked.
“Whoa there, Miss McGuire. Don’t leave just yet.” Whit cocked his head. “If you wouldn’t mind, ma’am, could I trouble you some more?”
“What now?” she asked in exasperation.
“If I’m seen like this,” he said, in a first show of humility, “I’ll be the laughingstock of four counties.”
A measure of her instinctive humor returned, and she chuckled. His very human reaction to possible ridicule was strangely endearing. “Actually, not the laughingstock you would’ve been if I hadn’t passed by.”
“Got me on that one,” he conceded, leaning a shoulder against a tree trunk. “Well, what’s it gonna be? Will you or will you not take a message across town?”
She shifted her weight to the other foot. “I will.”
“Good girl, sweet angel of mercy. And I thank you.”
For the first time she heard, really heard, the vibrating quality to his tone. Nice, so nice. Before she could settle her confusion, he leaned forward to brush the side of his roughened forefinger against her cheek, eliciting an involuntary quiver from Mariah.
Startled, she gazed into the ink-blue of his eyes. Gone was the arrogance, the impertinence. There was a look of undeniable interest.
Was his expression reflected in her brown eyes? Fearing so, and confused by her emotions, she stepped back. “You’d best give me directions.”
“I’d love to,” he murmured. “Ah . . . um ... my sister lives on Comanche Street. Tell her I need help. Clothes, and quick.” He went on to explain, “She runs a boardinghouse, only one in town. You can’t miss the sign. Lois Atherton is her name.”
Oh, no! They were certain to meet again, and Mariah, as a consequence of being too sheltered in spite of her advanced years, felt awkward. How would she handle the situation?
“One more thing,” he said. “What’s your given name?”
Allowing familiarity was neither proper nor prudent. “Miss McGuire is all you need.”
All he needed? She might be right. Heart hammering, Whit watched her go. The elegantly beautiful Miss McGuire could fill a blatant desire, no doubt about that. Her shapely body, her burnt-auburn hair, her milk-chocolate-colored eyes got to him.
It hadn’t taken him long to figure out she wasn’t wearing a corset, and didn’t need one. She was by no means petite, but that type never appealed to him, anyway. He liked his women on the tall side.
Beyond that, he was fascinated by her frosty airs which had rivaled the blue norther whipping across his cloak-clad body. When her ice had defrosted a bit, though, he had liked her even better. He got the idea there was one helluva warm woman beneath that glacial exterior. His kind of woman.
Damn. What was the matter with him? Miss McGuire was a lady, not a trollop. And ladies meant trouble. Parsons and babies’ breath and wedding rings.
Whit didn’t believe in marriage. Not since his wife had wound up dead in the burned-out ruins of their home. Dead, naked, and in the arms of another man, the man he had thought to be his best friend.
His top teeth ground against the bottom ones. He had learned his lesson about women on the quick side, and it stayed with him. Sixteen years had passed since Jenny had made him a cuckold, but no woman had played him for a besotted fool since then or would in the future.
Whit glanced at the cloudless sky, the sight shifting his thoughts to a more immediate problem. His hundred-section spread hadn’t had a drop of rain in months. The creeks were drying up. Of course, it was early in what should have been the rainy season, so the situation might right itself, but Whit was concerned; concerned enough that he intended, as soon as he got back to the ranch, to dam the spring-fed creek along the south pasture.
Whit had another worry. Joe Jaye. The stubborn farmer had continued his fence-stringing. So far, Whit had kept angry cattlemen from the tenderfoot’s fences, but how much longer would that hold?
These things preying on his mind, Whit shouldn’t be daydreaming about women. Correction. Woman. His mind’s eye kept drawing pictures of womanly allure. Miss McGuire. Will you ever see her again? a voice echoed within him. Well, he did have her cloak ...
He decided to make a point of looking her up.
“Well, I’m not surprised.” Lois Atherton, whom Mariah guessed to be about forty, shook her head of dark curls. “But I never figured it would take this long for Barbara to toss him on his hind end.”
Lois stopped hoeing the newly planted vegetable garden behind her clapboard boardinghouse. “Women are always gettin’ riled at my brother.”
Mariah wasn’t astounded at these frank words. During her travels from the Gulf Coast to west central Texas, she had experienced a great deal of Texas-style candor. In fact, she was beginning to believe nothing further could shock her anymore.
“They fall for Whit . . .” Lois clapped her hands to scare away a huge tabby cat that was eyeing Gus as if he were a joint of Sunday beef. “Scat, Fancy!”
While moving the parrot cage closer to her side, Mariah cast a menacing glare at the sharp-eyed feline.
“As I was saying,” Lois admitted, “Whit never sees fit to call a preacher and buy the ring.”
“Maybe he hasn’t met the right woman.”
“Hmmph.”
“Perhaps luck just hasn’t been with him.”
“You may be right.” Lois lifted a palm. “But I doubt it. You’ve heard the expression ‘once bitten, twice shy’? Well, that about sums up Whit’s problem.”
She assumed his sister would admit more about Whit Reagor, but Mariah didn’t press the subject, even though she was curious. For some odd reason, he hadn’t left her thoughts since their inauspicious meeting. Hair as black as a dark night, blue eyes tinged with dark gray, height tall enough to make her feel short ... He was like no man she had ever met before, not even Lawrence, but ...
Why couldn’t she be practical? Despite the memories of that wretched night in the shadows of Castle Cornet, where her virginity had been claimed, Joseph was the man for her.
Lois brushed her palms down the front of her gingham apron. “The ‘right’ women don’t perch in saloons. ’Course, if he’d tie up with ladies instead of strumpets, the story might be different.”
“He p-pays ladies to . . .” Had it been only minutes earlier when she’d thought nothing further could shock her?
“Whit? Ha! He doesn’t have to pay. Not to say he isn’t generous.” Lois yanked a weed from a mounded row. “Buys his gals trunkful after trunkful of fancy duds just for the pleasure of strippin’ those duds off their backs.”
Mariah blushed again, something she seemed to do often where Whit Reagor was concerned. Though she had tried her best to adjust to life in this often bewildering land, she was a product of her Calvinistic background. The females of Guernsey didn’t discuss men they barely knew, much less bedroom intimacies.
As for the man in question, here she was chattering with his sister while he waited to be rescued. “Mrs. Atherton, your brother is waiting for your help.”
Lois lifted a palm in an air of dismissal. “Aw, it’ll do him good to cool his heels awhile.”
A gust of air blew.
“Oh, all right. I’ll rescue the jackanapes. Come on in the house. Gotta fetch his clothes. Better bring that bird of yours. No tellin’ what Fancy might do.” The proprietress took off for the house. “I keep a room just off the kitchen for Whit, not that he uses it for much.” Short of the back porch, she said, “Too bad he’s too old to turn across my checkered apron. I’d teach him a lesson or two.”
Mariah grinned. Imagining that rough-and-tumble Texan–a man probably in his late thirties! –turned over an aproned lap was rather humorous to imagine.
Cage in hand, she followed Lois inside. The kitchen was toast-warm from the iron Chandler stove, and the scent of bacon and the soda bread Texans called biscuits filled her nostrils to remind her of the breakfast skipped at the Double Inn.
As if she sensed Mariah’s hunger, Lois offered, “There’s a plate under that cloth. Grab yourself a bite.”
“Oh, I can’t take someone’s food.”
“I was saving it for Whit. Always do when he’s in town.” The words had a wistful quality to them, but they were replaced with her former tone. “Usually feed it to the chickens, though. Go on, girl, eat up! If he’s hungry after I fetch him, I’ll fry up a half-dozen eggs.” Lois winked. “No matter how mad I get at Whit, I wouldn’t let the baby of the family go hungry.”
Underneath the brusque attitude toward her brother, Mariah believed Lois loved him very much. He did, she realized, have a way with women. Without a doubt, the man was spoiled rotten.
As the older woman disappeared into the room adjoining the cooking room, Mariah set her reticule on the table, lifted the cloth, and reached for one of the salty-pork, butter-dripping biscuits. Heaven’s! The staple diet for this frontier state, beans and fried-to-shoe-leather beef, had begun to get tiresome. But, she reminded herself, everyday life would be rosy after reaching Joseph’s estate.
She dabbed the linen cloth to her lips and fed crumbs to Gus. “Thank you,” she called to the adjoining room.
“Come on in here where I can hear you proper.”
Mariah found Lois Atherton folding a chambray shirt into a valise. The room smelled of leather and tobacco. Trousers, shirts, and a buckskin jacket hung from hooks in the wall. A cartridge belt lay on the oak bureau. Though she remembered Whit Reagor saying he had a “spread out west,” she wondered if he was a gunslinger. After all, there were those translucent-white scars on his upper body. She knew what they looked like, but how would it feel to touch them ... ?
Ashamed of her caprice, Mariah considered the gunbelt. Surely he wasn’t a gunslinger; her imagining him so had been the result of too many traveling hours spent reading too many dime novels. After all, her own reticule held a revolver, which didn’t make her an outlaw.
“My purpose for being here is twofold,” Mariah said, determined to get down to business. “I’m waiting for the Yuma stage, so I’ll be needing accommodations. Mrs. Watson at the inn said you might rent me a room.”
“I don’t board nobody lest I know something’ about them. Said you’re headin’ for Yuma, right?” Not waiting for an answer, she continued. “That’s a long ways for a woman alone to travel. Tell me about yourself.”
Mariah made explanations of her island homeland.
“So what is a lady from Guernsey doin’ in Dublin, Texas?”
“I’m on my way to a calling. Schoolteaching.”
Lois’s look was wary as she grabbed a pair of worn yet shiny boots. “I never figured you for a schoolmarm.”
“Well, I am, and I’m proud of it.”
“How’d you come to be a schoolmarm?”
Running her palm across a polished oak bureau, Mariah thought about an answer, and decided on the truth. “Actually, I’m not a full-fledged teacher as yet.”
“I see. But you still haven’t told me why.”
“I traveled to London when I was seventeen, and my heart went out to the street urchins. They seemed so hopeless.”
Mariah wouldn’t admit feeling a kinship toward those children. The hurt was too deep. If she lived to be a hundred, she’d never forget the long years of her miserable childhood yearning for her father’s affection.
Hopelessness she was well acquainted with. And she needed to be needed.
Though she had long given up on Logan McGuire, she had left him a letter on the day of leaving St. Peter Port. She’d spelled out her frustrations and anger. But she’d signed it with love. Did one ever not love a father, no matter how difficult he might be?
Lois asked, “Don’t they need teachers in Guernsey?”
“Of course, but–”
“You’d have to be ugly, which you’re not, if you’ve crossed the Atlantic just to force the three Rs down younguns’ throats. Must be another reason.”
Her mind not on Joseph, Mariah could have told her about Lawrence, but didn’t. With unseeing eyes, she pretended to study a paperweight. For years she had loved the dashing lieutenant. At eighteen, she had met him and her head was never turned by any other Guernseyman from then on. Her feelings for him had been so strong that she’d pushed aside her teaching aspirations, for all she’d needed to make her life co. . .
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