“Trust me, Miss Latham,” he said with heavy sarcasm, “I’ll manage to control myself.” Even if I have to visit a bordello seven nights a week, he thought. Really, the woman was too much! Her insinuation that he couldn’t control himself around her was more than he could take. If nothing else, he wanted to prove to her how wrong she was.
“Knowing Rowena, she isn’t going to leave Texas until she sees us married,” she continued, unaware of Cole’s thoughts. “If our false engagement lasts for four years, she will stay here and wait for four years. My sister might look soft and sweet, but she is forged iron inside.”
“How could your father have thought his daughters were soft?” Cole mumbled.
Cole knew that in Miss Latham’s eyes, his knowledge and skills were worthless, but his life had trained him to make quick decisions. And maybe her words and being shot had made him see things differently. Money aside, what was he going to do until his arm healed?
She might not want to go through with her original proposition but Cole had seen the way her eyes betrayed her feeling of guilt when his arm was mentioned. Never in his life had he felt anything but softness for a woman, but this one challenged him. Quickly he decided that he was going to use what he’d come to know about her. If she thought Rowena could be a bully, she’d never seen Cole Hunter in action.
“All right, Miss Latham, while
there’s no reason for you to feel responsibility for what has happened to my arm, the fact is that except for what you paid me the other day, all the money I have in the world is two dollars and twenty-five cents.” This was the truth, but he had been worse off than this before, yet he’d always found someone to stake him in a poker game and he’d been able to win enough to live on. But she didn’t need to know that.
“The way I see it is that you owe me.”
“I have offered to pay you.”
“And I’ve told you that I don’t want charity. I want to learn a trade.” About as much as he wanted bubonic plague. He could not see himself as a shopkeeper, even if the shop sold beer to drunks. “With you I see the chance of learning something that will help me in my later years. For the first time I see a way out of my life of degradation and death. I see the possibility of attaining respectability. I see a way to better myself and begin to live as others do. It is the first time I have been offered such a chance, and contrary to your opinion of me, I am not a fool. Miss Latham, I want to take that opportunity.”
Cole thought perhaps he’d missed his calling in life. Maybe he should have been a preacher or a snake oil salesman. Or maybe a senator. Hell, he was so full of hot air he was good enough to be president.
Before she could say a word, he continued, unwilling to stop when he was winning. “I want to ask you something. How many men have you kissed?”
She blinked at him. “J…just you.”
“Just as I thought. You seem to think there was something special between us, something different. Let me assure you that there was not. That feeling we experienced between us is the same with every kiss between a man and a woman. If you kissed your Mr. Pepper, you’d feel the same thing.” She tried to conceal her disappointment, but he could see it in her face, and her look almost made him retract his lie. But he didn’t.
“The problem seems to be that you think that if we spend any time together I will not be able to control myself and will die if I do not get you into bed with me. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
He kept on, not allowing her to say a word. “Miss Latham, I offer you a business proposition: Marry me for six months and let me run your town during that time. At the end of the six months if I have done a satisfactory job, I want you to give me five thousand dollars. That will be my stake in whatever I want to do in life.”
“Wouldn’t it be much simpler just to hire you as a manager for collecting the rent?”
Damn, but the woman had a disconcerting way of seeing straight to the truth! He gave her a little smile. “Unless I’m more than a manager, your sister will have her way.” He raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps I’ll be invited to your wedding with Alfred. Will his children attend? By the way, how old are his children?”
“His sons are twenty-five, twenty-three, and twenty,” she said.
Cole was so startled by this information that he couldn’t speak for a moment. “Not exactly in their nappies, are they?” he said softly, thinking that this small woman wasn’t at all what she had at first seemed. At their first meeting he had thought she needed no one, seemed able to take care of herself and half the world, but now he was beginning to get a clearer picture of what had driven her to ask a gunslinger to marry her.
Part of him knew it was the “hero” in him—he was beginning to hate that word—but he was starting to feel protective toward her. Her sister was trying to marry her off to a lazy man with three grown sons. All four of them would no doubt move into her house, take over her town, and spend her money.
He was tired of talking, tired of arguing. Quite suddenly he had a great deal of sympathy for Rowena. No wonder she was afraid to leave her defenseless sister alone in a large house at the mercy of every gold digger in the country. No wonder she was trying to force her to marry a man who could protect her. Rowena’s mistake was in thinking this old man with grown sons was the one for the job.
“You’re going to marry me, do you understand? You can bribe a judge to annul the marriage later if you want, but right now we need each other. You need protection from your well-meaning sister, and I need a place to hang my hat until I heal.” By the time he had finished this speech, he had gripped her upper arms with his hands and lifted her half off the floor. His nose was close to hers. “And don’t you say a word about kids or my killing people or anything else. I’ll straighten out that town of yours. It sounds as if the tenants are taking advantage of you with their reluctance to pay rent.”
“You’re going to shoot them?” she asked breathlessly.
He released his grip on her so suddenly she almost fell. Did she work at making him angry or did she do it without thought? “Here,” he said, his voice filled with anger as he began to unbuckle the gun belt at his waist. It hurt him more than a little. In fact, pain shot up his arm and he could feel his wound beginning to bleed as he tore it open, but he would have died before giving up his valiant gesture. He was dizzy with pain when he held the belt out to her like some primitive offering, but force of will kept him on his feet. “I am giving you my gun,” he said. “I won’t use it to collect the rent in your town, and if I try to touch you in any way, you have my permission to shoot me. Now do we have a deal?”
Silently, with great seriousness, she took the heavy gun belt from him. It seemed to take her a long time to make up her mind, but at last she said yes, and that was all.
Cole wasn’t sure whether he should be happy or terrified, but he allowed neither emotion to show. “All right, then, shall we go? Your sister is waiting.”
He bent his good arm for her to take. After only a second’s hesitation she slipped her small hand onto his forearm and they started toward the door, Dorie carrying Cole’s gun belt in her left hand, one end of it dragging the floor.
Chapter Five
Dorie tried not to sit on the edge of her seat, but such control was difficult. Self-control had been her main concern over the last few days, but now it was almost impossible. She was sitting in the bedroom of Rowena’s private railroad car—borrowed from some hopelessly besotted admirer—across a table from the stranger who was now her husband.