The Bridegroom (12 page)

“Mama sent me up here,” the boy announced staunchly,
“to tell you you’re to get over to the Porter house right away because Lydia is there alone and that won’t do.”

Gideon blinked. “Lydia’s still at the Porter house?” he asked. He’d expected his wife to return, with the others, and he said as much.

Hank shrugged. “I reckon she’s planning to spend the night. When we left, she was scrubbing down the kitchen cupboards, but that was a while ago.”

“If I give you a nickel,” Gideon ventured, bending a little and lowering his voice, “will you go over there and fetch her back here?”

Hank looked tempted, but in the end, he shook his head, Rowdy-stubborn. “I’d better not do that,” he decided. “Mama said tell
you
to go.”

“Hell,” Gideon muttered.

Behind the bathroom door, the commode flushed.

Julia appeared, a female version of her older brother, though smaller of course, and with a higher voice. “Uncle Gideon, you said a swearword!” she accused.

“Nothing wrong with your hearing,” Gideon replied, resigned.

“You’d best be getting on over to the other house,” Hank advised solemnly. “If you don’t, you’ll have Mama to deal with.”

“Perish the thought,” Gideon said.

He was tired.

His joints were starting to ache again as the effects of the bath began to wear off.

And now he was expected to traipse all the way to the other side of town because his bride was waiting.

A weary smile broke across his face.

His bride was waiting.

Why was he still standing there, in the upstairs hallway
of his brother’s house? He started toward his room, meaning to fetch work clothes for the morning, along with his toothbrush and some other things, and stuff them into a satchel, but Julia stopped him with a tug at his shirtsleeve.

“You’ll
catch it,”
she informed him, looking up at him with those huge, cornflower-blue eyes of hers, “if you leave the bathroom looking like it does right now.”

Stifling another swearword, Gideon went back into the room in question, rinsed the tub thoroughly, and picked up his dirty clothes and the towels he’d used.

“Are you happy now?” he asked his niece, who was still waiting in the hall, along with Hank. The resembled a pair of small sentinels, standing there.

Julia beamed up at him, nodding pertly, and Gideon noticed for the first time that she was missing her two front teeth.

Right about then, Rowdy, wearing his spectacles again, appeared at the top of the stairs, a storybook under one arm.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” he asked his two eldest children. “Like Joe and Marietta?”

“Mama sent me up here to tell Uncle Gideon to skedaddle, and I just got done doing that.” Hank eyed the book. “And I’m too old for bedtime stories.”

“I’m not,” Julia said, sidling up to her papa.

Rowdy’s gaze connected with Gideon’s, after he’d given one of Julia’s pigtails an affectionate tug, and the contentment Gideon saw in his brother’s eyes made him smile. The famous outlaw, the erstwhile train robber, a man once wanted in practically every state that side of Kansas, was about to read to a pack of towheaded hellions who all looked just like him.

Gideon nodded a good-night, took his laundry and dumped it on his bedroom floor, and gathered up the things he’d need in the morning.

When he reached the hallway again, it was empty, but he could hear Rowdy’s voice, low and full of dramatic inflection, coming from behind one of the closed doors.

Gideon paused to listen for a moment.

Some princess, to hear Rowdy tell it, was in big trouble.

Gideon smiled again as he walked away, but this time, he felt something more than amusement, a sort of lonely longing, with threads of pure envy woven through it.

What would it be like, he wondered, to have what Rowdy had—kids, a wife, a real home?

Taking the rear stairway, Gideon reminded himself that
he
had a wife, too. And she was waiting for him at the Porter house, all alone.

The old ladies were in the kitchen, seated primly at the table, when he passed through, the pair of them wearing ruffled nightcaps, gowns and wrappers, and sipping tea. They watched him intently as he crossed to the back door, opened it, and then paused, turned to face them, realizing it would be rude to leave without acknowledging them in some way.

“Good night, ladies,” he said.

“You be gentle with our Lydia, Mr. Yarbro,” one of them told him, her voice a twittery chirp. He still had no idea which one was which.

“Don’t be rough,” counseled the second sister.

Gideon colored up. How was he supposed to respond? If he promised to “be gentle” with Lydia, they’d figure he meant to deflower her—assuming they didn’t consider that water under the bridge. If he
didn’t
promise, they might decide he was a brute, and fret over their great-niece the whole night long.

He hadn’t had much experience with little old ladies, but he knew they tended to worry.

“Lydia,” he finally replied, “is safe with me.”

He ducked out before either of them could speak again, his clothes and shaving gear under one arm.

Lydia
was
safe with him, he thought, as he made his way across the darkened yard, through the back gate, and onto the long driveway leading out to the main street.

The knowledge should have been a comfort to him—but it wasn’t.

L
YDIA HAD FINISHED HER
leisurely bath and donned the ruffled nightgown Lark had provided. She’d let her hair down, and brushed it until it crackled, and dabbed perfume—from a tiny bottle some previous resident had left behind in the bathroom cabinet—in back of her ears and on the insides of her wrists.

She went into the bedroom she hoped to share with Gideon, her heart beating wildly, and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait.

Lark had assured Lydia that Gideon would join her at the Porter house—she’d see to it—but suppose he’d balked? Suppose, feeling, as the aunts would have put it,
commandeered,
Gideon chose to remain at Lark and Rowdy’s?

There was only one possibility more alarming than that one, as far as Lydia was concerned—that he would simply do as he was told and show up. There were lots of beds in this house—he might well choose to sleep in a different one.

Or
he might decide to set aside his confusing reticence and ravish her.

A little thrill, partly fear and partly anticipation, rushed through Lydia as she considered
that
prospect.

Last night’s episode had been pleasurable, to put it mildly.

But being
ravished
might be quite another thing.

What if it hurt terribly?

Downstairs, and far in the distance, a door opened and closed.

Lydia’s fluttering heart shinnied right up into her throat.

“Lydia?” It was Gideon’s voice, of course.

Lark had kept her promise.

Lydia swallowed.

“Let him come looking for you,”
Lark had told her, in this very room, that morning. Eons ago, it seemed to Lydia.

How much persuading had Gideon needed? Had he resisted, or agreed readily?

She heard his footsteps, brisk on the stairs.

Again, he called her name.

She had to bite down on her lower lip to keep from responding. The old-fashioned kerosene lamp on the bedside table was turned down low, but she reached out and turned the knob, so the wick lengthened and the light grew bright again.

“It’s good for a man to wait,”
Lark had said.
“And wonder a little, too.”

The bedroom door swung open then, startling Lydia so that she jumped.

Gideon stood in the gap, like a living portrait in a frame, the glow from the gas lamps lining the hallway walls catching in his damp, butternut hair.

The sight of him, broad-shouldered, with golden bristles on his cheeks because he needed a shave, literally took Lydia’s breath away. Left her reeling a little, at least on the inside, where she prayed it didn’t show.

He started to say something, then stopped as he took in her hair, tumbling free to her waist, the thin but not sheer nightgown, the covers turned back on the bed.

Completely stricken, Lydia found she could not speak.

Gideon shook his head, as though he thought he might
be seeing things that weren’t really there, but did not move from the doorway. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?” he asked, at some length and very quietly. He looked utterly confounded—so much so that Lydia wanted to laugh, and would have, if she hadn’t been so deliciously frightened.

“I heard you,” she confirmed.

“Then why didn’t you answer?” Gideon sounded curious, but not impatient.

“Because,” Lydia said, drawing now on her own relatively limited personal resources and not the things Lark had told her, “a lady does not yell.”

Gideon absorbed that. Then, to Lydia’s utter surprise, he threw back his head and gave a single and wholly masculine shout of laughter. When he met her now-widened gaze again, he countered very gruffly, “Doesn’t she?”

Lydia blinked. No suitable answer came to mind.

Gideon finally entered the room, though just far enough to close the door behind him. “Last night,” he said, “if I hadn’t kissed you at exactly the right time, you would have yelled fit to raise the roof.”

Lydia opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“But, then,” Gideon continued easily, “you weren’t exactly behaving like a
lady,
now, were you?”

Lydia blushed, watched in stubborn, flummoxed silence as Gideon walked across the room, not toward her, but to take a seat in an old rocking chair. As calmly as if he’d strolled into this bedroom every night of his life, he pulled off his boots, first one, then the other, and tossed them aside.

“Lady or not,” he said, raising his head to take her in with a slow, sweeping glance that left her feeling as though he’d removed every stitch she was wearing, “you
are
beautiful.”

What did one say, in such circumstances? “Thank you”
didn’t seem quite proper. And where was the wanton hussy, now that Lydia needed her?

Gideon stood, unbuttoned his shirt, shrugged out of it.

His chest, though scarred, looked Grecian to Lydia, perfectly chiseled, dusted in hair the color of his beard.

Lydia searched her mind for some tidbit of conversation, uncomfortable with the silence, wanting to turn the topic in another direction, but once again came up dry.

She squirmed a little, perching there on the edge of the mattress.

“I like your hair down,” Gideon said. He was very near by then, turning down the lamp until the wick sputtered and the flame went out. Moonlight spilled through the nearby window.

Gideon stood silently for a long time, just looking at her.

Then, still without a word, he went back to the door, opened it and stepped out. The gas lamps in the hallway went dark.

A little shiver of—of
something
scurried through Lydia on millions of tiny, silvery feet.

Gideon returned. “Shall we test your theory, Mrs. Yarbro?” he asked.

Lydia finally found her voice. “W-what theory would that be, Mr. Yarbro?” she countered.

He didn’t reply right away.

But he came to stand directly in front of Lydia, so close that his legs brushed her knees, and cupped a hand under her chin, raised her face to make her look at him.

“I promised two old ladies I would be gentle with you,” he told her, “and I will.”

Lydia swallowed, full of joyous terror.

His hands shifted to her shoulders, and he eased her gently onto her back. Leaned to taste her mouth, nibble at
her lower lip, trace the length of her neck with a single, unbearably light pass of his lips.

“I won’t hurt you, Lydia,” he said, once he’d set her trembling in earnest. “But I do intend to prove you wrong about one thing.”

Staring up at him, brimming with crazy hopes and frenzied trepidations, Lydia managed to murmur, “What?”

Her legs were still dangling over the side of the high bed.

Gideon knelt between them, took her ankles gently into his hands, and set her heels on the mattress. Not in a hurried way, but firmly, he pushed her nightgown up, inch by inch, until she was bared to him, from her shoulders to her toes.

“A lady
does
yell,” he murmured, parting her most intimate place, putting his mouth where his fingers had been the night before.

And feasting upon her.

Like something wild, seized with the instinct to mate, Lydia arched her back and cried out as Gideon alternately suckled and teased.