Lucy's Liberation [Elk Creek 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (6 page)

What the hell? He had risked far more for much less and it wasn’t as if Ki didn’t love a little healthy competition. Opposition was good for the soul and kept a body honest.

“Well, Mr. Benjamin, now that you’ve heard the terms of your uncle’s will do you have any questions or anything you’d like to contribute?” the lawyer asked.

Ki took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, envisioning his next move, mentally fencing—attack, feint, lunge, parry.

He’d been with many women from all walks of life in New York and around the world. He’d wined and dined debutantes and socialites from Paris to London to Italy and beyond. He’d never been driven, however, to do what he was contemplating doing right then.

Ki opened his eyes and peered at the lawyer. “I don’t have any questions at all, Mr. Flint. However, I do have a counter-offer to make to Mrs. Peyton.” He turned in his seat to face her and felt several sets of glances following him again. The room was pin-drop silent and he could tell that Lucy was holding her breath just like everyone else in the office was.

He grinned as Lucy looked at him like a deer at a watering hole suddenly caught in the crosshairs of a hunter’s rifle.

His mother always told him that he had a flair for the dramatic and loved being the center of attention. He knew that she was right and sometimes he thought he had missed his calling not pursuing acting as a profession instead of the law. He was certainly enjoying the moment, making everyone wait with bated breath to hear what he had to say to Lucy.

Ki homed in on her full, slightly parted lips now and wondered what they tasted like. He wondered what she would do if he leaned forward, and bent his head to kiss her.

If he didn’t nip his rampant imagination in the bud right then, he wouldn’t be able to say what he wanted in his commanding and convincing courtroom voice—the voice he needed to employ to ensure that Lucy, that everyone in the room, understood he was serious.

Ki took both of Lucy’s trembling hands in his and she surprisingly let him. He gently squeezed her fingers and held her luminous color-change gaze with his. He took a deep breath, and said, “Marry me and I’ll assign half of all the assets, including ownership of the saloon and the house, to you as soon as the will is out of probate.”

Lucy gaped and Cody sprang to his feet.

“Now you just wait a cotton-picking minute right there, Mr. Fancy Pants Easterner. You can’t just come in here and—”

“Your proposal is a bit unorthodox to say the least,” Mr. Flint said.

Ki spared the lawyer a look over his shoulder. “No more so than the entire will and its stipulations.” He turned back to Lucy and peered at her. “Well, Mrs. Peyton, you seem to have two options on the table. Which one will you agree to?”

“Please don’t call me that,” she rasped.

“What would you like me to call you then?”

“You, Mr. Benjamin, can call me…fiancée.”

* * * *

“Are you sure about this, Lucy?” Thayne asked her as they stood outside the office in the main corridor of the building.

Was she sure? Lucy hadn’t been less sure about anything in her life. In fact, she hadn’t been sure about much of anything since Rance had died and left her up a creek without a paddle. Sometimes, she felt like she was going plumb loco.

What other reason was there for her to agree to marry Hezekiah Benjamin?

Aside from the fact that he hadn’t delivered the most romantic of proposals, she had just gotten out of one horrendous marriage. How could she recklessly walk into another one with a relative stranger?

Was she that desperate to get what rightfully belonged to her?

She had slaved away the better part of seven years in Peyton’s, sometimes forced to do unmentionable things with virtual strangers. She wanted to know what it was like to be independent, to
own
something. She had actually earned Peyton’s. She had put just as much blood, sweat, and tears into the business as Rance had.

Was she being too mercenary, too proud and selfish? Wouldn’t it be better to just move on, away from the saloon and all those bad memories and just start fresh?

She didn’t want to be a quitter though. She’d felt if she turned her back on both options presented to her, she’d be quitting. She’d be letting Rance win, not that he wasn’t doing a heck of a job getting the best of her even from the grave. If it wasn’t for his daft stipulations, she would already own Peyton’s and the house, just by virtue of being Rance’s widow.

Lucy forced herself to smile for Thayne’s sake and watched as some of the tension slowly left his body. “I’m about as sure as I’m going to get,” she said.

Thayne smiled back at her and squeezed her shoulder. She immediately felt better at his touch. He always seemed to have such a calming effect on her and she didn’t know what she would have done without him to lean on all these months.

He was a good and sweet man and Maia was lucky to have him.

Thinking about the Malloys and their happy marriage made Lucy doubt her decision all the more, but she wouldn’t go back on her word. Her word was all she had, after all, and she wasn’t going to give Mr. Benjamin the satisfaction of seeing her doubt.

What about that devoted and loving husband and the babies you wanted?

Maybe that life wasn’t meant for her. Maybe what men like Rance and Cody and Hezekiah offered her was all she was ever going to get. Maybe being a convenient choice for some man was her fate. She could live with that. She had lived with much worse after all.

Lucy swallowed hard at the thought that she had compromised and given up on her dreams again.

At least with Cody she knew what she would have been getting. Granted, that wasn’t much better than what she’d had with Rance since he and Cody were rightly cut from the same cloth. She would have only had to stay married to Cody for a year in order to get everything. With Hezekiah, she knew next to nothing about the sort of man he was and she would get half of everything almost immediately if he stuck to the written agreement Thayne and Mr. Flint had just witnessed her and Hezekiah sign. On top of everything she only had to stay married to Hezekiah for six months.

One year for everything, six months for half of everything.

Lucy weighed the settlement in her head and she still wasn’t sure she hadn’t just run from the fire right into the flames.

Thayne took his pocket watch out and flipped it open to check the time. “Well, if you don’t need me here for anything else, I think I’m going to mosey on over to the shop and check in on the wife.”

Lucy chuckled at his eagerness to leave. What she wouldn’t do to have a man who wanted to be with her every hour of every day the way Thayne and Cade liked being with Maia. “I’m all right here. You go on and get to Maia. Tell her and Sabrina I’ll be there directly.”

“Will do.” Thayne leaned in to give her a hug and Lucy heard someone clearing his throat behind them just as Thayne pulled away.

“If you have some time to spare, I thought we might discuss some of the finer points of our agreement,” Hezekiah said.

Thayne gave her a questioning look and this time it was Lucy who squeezed his shoulder instead of the other way around. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, giving him permission to leave.

He glanced over her shoulder and hesitated like he was still unsure whether or not he should leave her to her own devices.

She didn’t blame him. She hadn’t, after all, acted like the sanest person in the world in the last couple of hours.

“I guess I’ll see you at the shop then,” Thayne finally said and tipped his hat at Hezekiah before turning to leave.

Lucy watched him go out the door and took a deep breath before turning to confront…her new fiancé. “Mr. Benjamin.”

“Oh, certainly we can drop the formality now that we’re engaged.”

“Okay. Hezeki—”

“I prefer Ki.” He took a step toward her, caught her hand and brought it to his lips to place a gentle kiss on the back of her wrist.

She felt like she should snatch her hand away, but his mouth on her skin felt too good. Besides, she didn’t want to be rude, did she?

Cody, on the other hand, didn’t have any such compunction about being uncouth and growled at her and Hezekiah as he pushed by them to get to the door.

He turned with his hand on the knob, giving them one final glare. “You haven’t heard the last of me on this, Mr. Fancy Pants.”

“I’m sure I haven’t.”

Cody left and slammed the door behind him.

Lucy shuddered and felt like she hadn’t made such a bad choice after all. Then she turned her attention back to Hezekiah and saw his crooked smile. “So, Ki is it?”

“It’s what my family and friends call me.”

“Um, that’s…right nice.” She slipped her hand out of his and held it stiffly at her side.

Seemingly unfazed, Hezekiah slid his arm through hers instead, forcing her to bend her elbow as he patted her hand. “Perhaps you’d like to take me on a tour of your fair city and then we could go ring shopping.”

“Ring shopping?”

“Well, of course. We are engaged, after all.”

“Mr. Benjamin, there’s no need to put on a show. We both know that your proposal was just a nice way to assuage your guilty conscience.”

His mouth twitched as if he was trying not to laugh. “My guilty conscience?”

Lucy’s hand tingled with the need to smack that smug smile right off of his face. Lordy, since when had she become so violent and hateful?

She slid her arm from his and put her fists on her hips before slowly tilting back her head to stare him in the face. “What took you so long to come?”

“To Elk Creek?”

Lucy gritted her teeth. How could he be so calm when she was about to explode? “Yes, to Elk Creek. Mr. Flint contacted you several months ago and all his telegrams and letters went unanswered. Why did you finally come?”

“Yes, well, your missive proved quite a bit more, shall we say, persuasive than the lawyer’s.”

“You mean if I hadn’t finally contacted you, you wouldn’t have come?”

“Does it really matter
why
I came?”

“It certainly does matter to me. I would have been out on the street all this time were it not for friends who helped me and took me in, in my time of need. While you…” She poked him in his chest with her index finger and felt a fluttering low in her belly at the broadness of his shoulders and the general solidness of him. Lordy… “While you we’re out gallivanting around doing Lord knows what with Lord knows who and without a care in the world!”

“Gallivanting?” He laughed.

“You seem the sort not to stay in one place for very long.”

He cleared his throat. “Yes, well…”

Was that a blush creeping up the sides of his neck? Lucy never would have thought it possible to embarrass the shameless…bachelor!

She had heard about his type, what Cody and some of the other cowboys in town had already started calling Fancy Pants, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, living it up in the big city, while she could barely make ends meet.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was worse than Cody. At least she knew Cody was a hard worker, if also a self-important bully. Hezekiah, on the other hand, didn’t look like he had worked an honest day in his life.

She remembered the feel of his hand in hers and the skin on his palm had been as smooth as a baby’s bottom, barely a callus on it.

Lucy swallowed at her train of thought because Hezekiah had hands like…like Prentice.

Why was she thinking so much about him lately? He’d been gone several months now and they’d only had that one encounter at Peyton’s, nothing to base a relationship on.

He had been so caring with her, though, so gentle.

“Can I be honest with you, Lucy?”

“By all means.”

“To tell you the truth, my delay in coming out here was a combination of things, but mostly because I was traveling abroad and didn’t see Mr. Flint’s notices until my return. And by then…let’s just say I wasn’t eager to revive unpleasant memories of my uncle.”

Lucy had always been one to give a body the benefit of the doubt and she stared at Hezekiah to gauge how much of what he was saying was true and how much was just plain bull cocky. He did sound…sincere, especially when he’d confided about Rance. Had Rance…done something to Hezekiah in the past?

Lucy shook her head at the thought. Surely she’d heard the rumors during her and Rance’s entire marriage living in Elk Creek and she’d tried to ignore them. What had or hadn’t happened to Hezekiah in the past, however, was none of her business except maybe how far it would affect their marriage.

She looked at his face, surprised by the olive tone of his complexion. He didn’t seem like the sort to get out in the sun much, like, say, a cowboy, but he had the tan of a man who spent his days outdoors. Maybe it was all that “traveling abroad.”

Lucy could tell now that he regretted mentioning his uncle. Indeed, he looked a mite shocked that he had let slip what little he had to her.

She was about to open her mouth and say something when Hezekiah headed her off at the pass and said, “Ignoring you or your circumstances was never my intention, Lucy. Had I known about your plight, I would have made it my business to arrive here much sooner.”