Fool for Love (Montana Romance) (35 page)

“All we have to do to get your name on that deed is pay a short visit to Christian and get him to legally marry us.”

“All right.”

Eric took half a step back, giving her a quizzical look.  “Are you sure you’re feeling well?”

She blinked rapidly, flushing as her old friend guilt spread through her.  “Yes, I’m fine.”

“’Cuz you caved in awful easy that time,” he finished.

“Did I?”

“I usually get a struggle every time I ask you to marry me.”

“Oh.”  She felt too stupid to come up with a better reply or an argument against marrying him.

“It’s not a problem.”  A grin spread across Eric’s face.  “I kinda prefer it when you don’t struggle.  I’ll have Christian draw up a marriage certificate first thing tomorrow.”

“Eric, I don’t know if-”

“Yeah, I thought so,” he drawled.  A twist of genuine disappointment flashed beneath his humor.

He pulled her close to kiss her again.  Amelia did her best not to be stiff and tense in his arms.  Everything was wrong but she had no idea exactly how it was wrong, so she had no idea how to fix it.  Eric was disappointed, she was disquieted, and she still had no idea what Curtis wanted, other than the ranch and now her.

“Right then, Mrs. Quinlan,” Eric said with a broad smile and a cowboy’s ease, “think you could whip up a few sandwiches or something?”

“Of course.”

She forced herself to smile.  She forced herself to leave the unpacking and leave the bedroom to follow Eric downstairs.  Curtis was nowhere in sight.  If only she could force herself to keep her wits about her long enough to discover what he was up to without running.

Chapter Twenty

Eric had never been one for church on Sundays, but the itching in his back hadn’t gone away in days.  Church was where people went when they felt like that, or so he supposed.  That and Michael and Charlie were having baby Eloise baptized, so he had to go.

After two tense days of living at the ranch again and he felt as though the good Lord was calling him in to learn a few things about patience and forgiveness.  Patience with Charlie for running hot and cold and forgiveness for Curtis.  Or maybe the other way around, he wasn’t so sure anymore.  Ever since he’d walked up the stairs and found the two of them cozy in his bedroom he hadn’t been able to shake the notion that Curtis was flirting and Amelia was letting him.  She wouldn’t though, would
she?  Curtis certainly would.

Church was always the most crowded party in town.  Eric stretched in the pew where he sat with Amelia and Christian at the front of the church, twisting to watch Cold Springs’s finest filing in.  Mabel and Ike were trying to squash all their kids into a pew near the back.  Mrs. Wayne was watching him from the side as if trying to convince him to take the sheriff job through telepathy.  He turned to Amelia to share the story of his run-in with the old bag.

Amelia was pale and tense, chewing her lip and staring at her stomach.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said.  He wasn’t convinced.  “I’ve just had a lot to think about recently.”

“I’ll say.”  He rested his arm around her shoulder, banishing his own uneasy thoughts.  “You’ve been busy nesting.  Isn’t that what they call it when a mamma bird gets ready for baby birds?”

Amelia gifted him with a short smile.  That awful guilty look was sharp in her eyes.  Hell.

“I got an idea,” he said, leaning closer.

“What idea?”

He grinned.  “What’s say we stay late after church and get the reverend to marry us?”

As he expected, Amelia answered, “Eric, you know we can’t do that,” with that voice that shriveled him.  “Everyone thinks we already are married,” she went on.  “We’ve been over this.”

“We could keep it under our hats.”

The doubtful look she gave him had just enough humor in it to unknot his back and make him smile.

“Right, I know,” he said.  “Nobody in a small town can keep anything under their hats.”

Michael and Charlie arrived with the baby, Phin in tow.  All troubles were forgotten as Amelia stood and walked to greet them.  She looked as pretty as an angel leaning over the tiny baby.  Charlie and Michael included them both in their circle of friends at the front of the church.  It was just about a perfect moment.

If only Jacinta ha
dn’t arrived at the same time.

Jacinta stomped into the church wearing a peach checkered dress that made Eric cringe, or maybe that was the haughty tilt of her chin and cold smile on her lips that gave him chills.  She didn’t say good morning to any of her neighbors, a sure sign her back was up or her nose was out of joint or some other body part was acting strangely.  She held a piece of paper in her hand and strode toward the front of the church.

When she reached the front where Eric stood, his hand on Amelia’s back, she stopped.  The conversation Amelia had been having with Charlie dropped off.  The two women looked at Jacinta and Jacinta looked back at them the way a pack of dogs stare each other down when there’s about to be a fight.  Eric glanced from Michael to Christian and Phin, glad the other two were there.  He might need them as back-up to break something up.

But then Jacinta relaxed into a self-satisfied grin – as if an entire argument had happened and she’d won – then moved to seat herself in the first pew across the aisle.  She smoothed the paper she was holding across her skirt.  The important bits were face-down, but Eric recognized a telegram when he saw one.

“What the devil has gotten into her?” Christian asked as they took their seats in the row across from Jacinta.

“You tell me,” Eric muttered back.  “She works for you.”

“Not for much longer she doesn’t,” Christian said, crossing his arms.  “Not if she keeps losing things the way she’s been doing.”

“Losing things?  What things?”

Christian sent him a sidelong glance before saying, “She misplaced the deed to your ranch.  But don’t worry, it shouldn’t be too hard to draw up another one.”

“Hell.”  Amelia clamped a hand on his leg and he muttered, “Sorry.”

She didn’t remove her hand.  Whatever was bothering her was still there.  He took her hand and warmed it in both of his.

He leaned closer to Christian and whispered, “How soon until we can draw up a new deed?  I want to get Amelia’s name on the ranch – and that other legal document we talked about – before the baby is born.”

Christian only had time answer, “Soon.”

The organist began the strains of the first hymn and they all stood.

Eric had always lived far enough from town to use distance as an excuse not to come to church except on special occasions, but as the congregation swelled into singing he caught himself wondering why he didn’t go more often.  There was an odd sort of comfort in singing all the old hymns, the ones you’d learned when you were a kid, in harmony with your neighbors.  And although Christian couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and Amelia evidently didn’t know any of the words, he thought he did a reasonable job of adding to the celestial choir.

As soon as they sat down for Rev. Andrews to begin his sermon, though, Eric’s mind wandered.

Curtis was a pill, that’s all there was to it.  All this time Eric had believed he could trust his cousin to run the ranch in his absence, only to come home and find it neglected.  What the hell had the man been doing all this time?  Curtis knew as well as he did that ranching was their first priority.  His cousin constantly accused him of being bad at business, but he was the one who had sold half the herd right out from under him at a loss.  Any fool could see that was a dumb move.  It was a far-sight worse than the deal Eric had made the previous year.

Only Curtis had been involved in that as well.  He had insisted that they go with an outfit operating out of California instead of sending the cattle back east.  He’d argued that transportation costs would be less.  Well, maybe they were and maybe they weren’t.  All Eric knew was that at the end of the day, when the contracts were signed and the order fulfilled, they had come up a lot shorter than he’d anticipated and Curtis had been nowhere in sight.  The same thing had happened the year before that as well.  What had seemed like a golden deal had turned into disappointment.

Eric shifted in his seat.  Somehow the odds were always stacked against him on the ranch.  He would have sworn to anyone who would ask him that he knew ranching inside and out, but nothing ever seemed to work.  He stared up at the cross on the wall at the front of the church as he thought about it.  Maybe God was trying to tell him something, that ranching wasn’t for him, that he should give something else a try.  But no, that didn’t sit right either.

He continued to squirm as the sermon wore on.  Rev. Andrews sure did like to talk.  He shuffled some papers in the pulpit.  He’d written his whole sermon out.  Wasn’t that just dandy.  But it would also be nice to be able to read a sermon as fast as Rev. Andrews could read, as fast as everyone else could read.  Eric peeked sideways at Jacinta.  She still held the telegram against her skirt the way some people held their Bibles, reading like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Eric crossed his arms and stared straight forward, thoughts flying back to the ranch.  Maybe God was trying to tell him that he should have read the contracts for all those business deals instead of letting Curtis sort them out.  Curtis had seemed so eager.  He’d kept insisting he wanted to learn the ranching business inside and out, that he wanted to clear his end of the property and set up for himself.  All that and he hadn’t learned much at all.  Hell.  Curtis was the one who was bad at business, not him.

By the time the sermon ended and Rev. Andrews invited Michael and Charlie up to have Eloise baptized, Eric had built up a head of steam and wanted to go home.  He needed to have a long talk with Curtis a
bout the future, and the past.

He stopped his thoughts there and focused his attention on the baptism.  Neither Michael nor Charlie were particularly religious, but they smiled like angels as Rev. Andrews dribbled water over tiny little Eloise and made the sign of the cross on her forehead.  He’d be up there in a few months himself, no matter how seldom his backside warmed a pew in the church.  That is, if Amelia wanted it.

He squeezed Amelia’s hand, still tucked in his, and smiled at her.  Saints be praised, she smiled back.  All of his anxious thoughts unwound like a rope losing its coil.  Amelia was on his side.  She was true as rain and she was his.

He was halfway to patting himself on the back for his good luck when Jacinta hopped up from her seat across the aisle

“Thank you, Rev. Andrews,” Jacinta said as she stomped to the pulpit and turned to face the congregation.

Eric blinked and sat straighter.  He’d been off wool-gathering while the baptism had ended, Michael and Charlie had taken their seats, and a whole slew of announcements had happened.  Amelia lost her smile and was wound tighter than a kite string beside him.  Her eyes were wide and fixed on Jacinta.  He had no idea why until he noticed Jacinta staring at Amelia with a haughty smirk.

“Friends,” Jacinta began, “while I am loathe to interrupt this joyous occasion, information has come to my attention that I feel it is my Christian duty to share with you all.”

A murmur passed through the congregation.  Little Eloise, her head damp, started wailing.  Amelia gripped Eric’s hand so hard his blood stopped.

Jacinta cleared her throat and went on.  “It has come to my attention that there is a snake in our midst, a shape-shifting harlot masquerading as a respectable woman.”  Eric guessed what was coming a breath before Jacinta said, “Her name is
Miss Amelia Elphick deLaurent
.”

Eric squeezed Amelia’s hand.  The congregation muttered in confusion.

“You think you know her as Mrs. Amelia Quinlan,” Jacinta solved the mystery, “but in fact she and Eric Quinlan are not married.”

Now the congregation was catching on.  Their confused murmurs shifted to shock and offense.  Eric stretched his arm around Amelia’s back, wishing he’d tried a hell of a lot harder to marry his wife.

“Not only are they not married, that’s not even his baby,” Jacinta charged on.  “It belongs to a man named Nicholas Hayworth!  A man to whom she was also not married.  Yes, that’s right!  That woman is as much of a whore as the saloon girls,” she said, flinging a finger at Amelia.

Eric’s fury launched him right out of his seat.  “You’re lying!” he said as if he believed it.

The buzz of the congregation rose to a roar.  Rev. Andrews attempted to step up to the pulpit, hissing, “This is the Lord’s house, Jacinta!”

“It’s true!” Jacinta shouted over the noise.  She shook the telegram in her hand.  “I have proof.  No fewer than three of my friends in London have confirmed the story!  That woman’s father was a drunk and a debtor and the ladies of her family, if you can even call them that, stooped to the lowest means to earn their bread.  Do you really want someone like that polluting this church and this town?”

“Jacinta!” Christian shot to his feet.  “Sit down!”

Amelia rose, face red and downcast.  She tried to push past Eric and run, but Eric caught her in his arms and held her close.