The Bridegroom Read online

  Was it already time to help Helga set the table for supper?

  Mittie, fairly bursting with news, continued to shine as brightly as if she’d climbed a ladder into a night sky and gobbled the moon down whole, like one of the small, sweet biscuits she enjoyed every afternoon with her tea.

  Finally, breathless with excitement, the old woman could not contain the announcement any longer. “You have a caller!” she bubbled. “A gentleman caller.”

  Lydia frowned as the faint pounding beneath her temples began again. “Mr. Fitch is back?”

  “No,” Millie blurted, appearing just behind Mittie, popping her head up over her taller sister’s right shoulder, then her left. “This man is handsome!”

  “He doesn’t have an automobile, however,” Mittie pointed out, sobering a little. “And while his clothes are certainly well fitted, I doubt he’s at all rich.”

  “Who on earth—?” Lydia muttered, stooping to glance into the mirror on her vanity table and assess the state of her hair.

  A few pats of her hands set it right.

  And neither Mittie nor Millie said a word.

  They simply stood there, in the doorway, gaping at her as though she’d changed somehow, since they’d seen her last.

  “Is there a calling card?” Lydia prodded, staring back.

  Neither answered.

  Lydia tried again. “Did he at least give his name, then?”

  “He did,” Millie said, her nearly translucent cheeks blushing pink, “but I’m afraid I was so taken aback by his resemblance to dear Major Bentley Alexander Willmington the Third that it has completely escaped me.”

  At this, Mittie bristled. “He does not resemble the major, sister. He is the image of my own Captain Phillip Stanhope.”

  Millie straightened her narrow shoulders. “You refer, of course,” she replied stiffly, “to that traitor to the Southern cause?”

  “Captain Stanhope was not a traitor, Millicent Fairmont! He was a man of principle who could not abide the Peculiar Institution—”

  “Ladies,” Lydia interceded, hoping to head off another of the sisters’ rare but spirited battles. The term Peculiar Institution referred to slavery, and with her marriage to Mr. Fitch fast approaching, Lydia found the subject even more abhorrent than usual. “Whoever this man is, I’m sure he looks exactly like himself and no one else.”

  As she swept toward the door, forcing her aunts to part for her like small waves on a sea of time-faded ebony bombazine, Lydia’s response echoed uncomfortably in her fogged brain.

  She was only eighteen, and already she was starting to sound just like Mittie and Millie.

  If the mysterious caller turned out to be a bill collector, as she suspected he would, she would simply inform him that, as of tomorrow, all claims should be referred to her husband, founder and president of the First Territorial Bank. There were, after all, a few consolations attached to her forthcoming marriage.

  The aunts crept along behind Lydia as she descended the stairs, calling upon all the dignity she possessed. After today, she would not have to deal with visits like this one.

  “He’s in the parlor!” Mittie piped, in a voice sure to carry far and wide. Like Millie, she was midway down the stairs, clinging to the rail, as eager-faced as a child about to open gifts on Christmas morning.

  Lydia put a finger to her lips and tried to look just stern enough to silence them, but not so stern as to make them cry.

  She could not bear it when the aunts cried.

  Reaching the entryway, Lydia drew a deep breath. Then, after straightening her skirts and squaring her shoulders, she marched through the wide doorway and into the parlor—and nearly fainted dead away.

  Gideon rose out of the Judge’s leather chair—no one, not even Jacob, sat in that chair—and regarded her with a pensive smile, his handsome head cocked slightly to one side.

  “You look all right to me,” he said.

  Lydia was so stunned, she could not manage a single word.

  Gideon pulled an all-too-familiar envelope from the pocket of his shirt, held it up. Her letter.

  “It finally reached me,” he told her quietly. “I don’t go by ‘Rhodes’ anymore—that was my brother Rowdy’s alias, and I borrowed it for a while. But my last name is ‘Yarbro.’”

  He seemed to be waiting for some reaction to that.

  Flustered, Lydia croaked out, “Do sit down, Gid—Mr. Yarbro.”

  He grinned. She remembered that grin, slanted and spare. It had made her eight-year-old heart flitter, and that hadn’t changed, except that now the reaction was stronger, and ventured beyond her chest.

  “Not until you do,” Gideon said, his green eyes twinkling a little for all their serious regard.

  Lydia crossed the room and sank into her aunt Nell’s reading chair, grateful that her wobbly knees had carried her even that far.

  Once she was seated, Gideon sat, too.

  “The letter?” Gideon prompted, when Lydia didn’t speak right away.

  Lydia felt her neck heat, and then her face. If only the floor would open and Aunt Nell’s chair would drop right through, and her with it. “It must have been sent by accident, Mr. Yarbro, and you must pay it no heed,” she said, in a rush of words. “No heed at all—”

  Lydia stopped herself from prattling with a determined gulp. What was the matter with her? First, she hadn’t been able to utter a syllable, she’d been so thunderstruck, and now she was inclined to chatter senselessly.

  “Gideon,” he said, very solemnly, his eyes still watchful.

  “I beg your pardon?” It took all the force of will Lydia possessed not to squirm in her chair.

  “Call me Gideon, not Mr. Yarbro.” He leaned forward, easy in the imposing chair, easy in his skin. Rested his elbows on his thighs and looked deep inside Lydia, or so it seemed. His probing gaze made her feel uncomfortable, intrigued, and almost naked, all of a piece. “You sent the letter, Lydia,” he reminded her, “and I don’t believe it was an accident.”

  “She’s getting married tomorrow,” Helga proclaimed loudly from the parlor doorway, a herald in a plain dress, apron and mobcap. All she lacked, in Lydia’s fitfully distracted opinion, was a long brass horn with a banner hanging from it and velvet shoes with curled toes. “To a man she hates.”

  Lydia’s face throbbed with mortification. “Helga,” she said firmly, “I do not hate Jacob Fitch, and you are overstepping—again. Kindly return to the kitchen and attend to your own affairs.”

  Helga didn’t obey—she never did—and the aunts stayed, too, hovering behind the housekeeper, all aflutter.

  “All right,” Helga conceded, “perhaps you don’t actually hate Fitch, but you certainly aren’t in love with him, either!”

  Lydia’s humiliation was now complete.

  Gideon rose from his chair, crossed the room, and spoke so quietly to the women clustered in the doorway that Lydia couldn’t make out his words. Miraculously, the avid trio subsided, and Gideon closed the great doors in their faces.

  Lydia sat rigid, and squeezed her eyes shut.

  She didn’t hear Gideon approaching her, and when his hand came to rest on her shoulder, she started, gave a little gasp. It wasn’t so much surprise that had made her jump, she realized, horrified, but the strange, sultry charge Gideon’s touch sent coursing through her entire system.

  “Open your eyes, Lydia,” he said. “Look at me.”

  He was crouched beside her chair now, his green gaze searching her face, missing nothing, uncovering secrets she’d kept even from herself.

  Or so it seemed.

  “It’s really a misunderstanding,” she whispered, trying to smile.

  Gideon took her hand. Squeezed it gently. “Stop lying to me,” he said, his voice husky and very quiet. “Who is this Jacob Fitch yahoo, and why are you getting married to him if you don’t love the man?”

  Lydia swallowed, made herself look directly at Gideon. She forced out her answer. “I have my reasons.”

&nbs
p; “And those reasons are…?”

  Tears blurred Lydia’s vision; she tried to blink them away. “What does it matter, Gideon? I have no choice—that’s all the explanation I can give you.”

  He straightened, reluctantly let go of her hand, went to stand facing the marble fireplace, his back turned to her. Looked up at the life-size portrait of the Judge looming above the mantel, dominating the entire room, big as it was.

  At least, Lydia’s great-grandfather’s painted countenance had dominated the room, seeming so real that she’d swear she’d seen it breathing—until Gideon Yarbro’s arrival.

  “There are always choices, Lydia,” Gideon said gruffly. “Always.”

  He turned around, leaned back against the intricately chiseled face of the fireplace, folded his arms. His shoulders were broad, under his fresh white shirt, and his butternut-colored hair, though still slightly too long, had been cut recently…

  She gave herself a little shake. Why was she noticing these things?

  Lydia sat up a little straighter in her chair. Maybe there were “always choices,” as Gideon maintained, but in her case, all the alternatives were even worse than the prospect of becoming Mrs. Jacob Fitch.

  The aunts, fashionably impoverished now, would become charity cases. Their cherished belongings would be sold at auction, pawed through and carried away by strangers.

  And she herself, with no means of earning a living, might be reduced to serving drinks in one of Phoenix’s overabundance of saloons—or worse.

  No, she would marry Mr. Fitch.

  The following afternoon, at two o’clock, she’d be standing, swathed in silk and antique lace, almost where Gideon was standing now, with Jacob beside her and his termagant of a mother looking on from nearby, while a justice of the peace mumbled the words that would bind Lydia like ropes, for the rest of her life.

  “Lydia,” Gideon said firmly, sending her thoughts scattering like chickens suddenly overshadowed by the wingspan of a diving hawk. “Talk to me.”

  “I’ll lose this house if I don’t marry Mr. Fitch,” Lydia heard herself say. “The aunts—you saw them, they’re ancient—will be displaced—no, destitute. It doesn’t—it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  Gideon tilted his head back, scanning the high ceiling, with its hand-carved moldings and thousands of tiny inlaid seashells imported from some faraway ocean.

  Lydia wished she could magically transport herself to that ocean. Jump in and sink beneath its waves and never be seen again.

  But, alas, there she remained, in that august parlor, in the middle of dry and dusty Phoenix, with no handy place to drown.

  “It’s a fine house,” Gideon allowed. “But it’s only a house. And your aunts would adapt to new surroundings. People do, you know—adapt, I mean.”

  Lydia stood up abruptly, found that her knees were still quite unreliable, and dropped back into her chair again. “You don’t understand,” she protested weakly.

  Gideon’s handsome face hardened a little. “I’m afraid I do,” he answered. “You’re willing to sell yourself, Lydia. And the price is a house. It’s a bad bargain—you’re worth so much more.”

  His statement stung its way through Lydia, a dose of harsh medicine.

  But then a strange, twittering little laugh escaped her, as she remembered just how hopeless her situation truly was.

  Would the embarrassment never end? Again, she found that she could not look at Gideon, could not expose herself to the expression she’d surely catch on his face if she did. “Just forget the letter, Gideon,” she said. “I’m sorry if I inconvenienced you, made you go out of your way, but, really, truly, I—”

  “I can’t,” Gideon broke in. “I can’t ‘just forget the letter,’ Lydia. Our agreement was that you’d send it if you were in trouble, and I know you are. In trouble, that is.” He paused. “And I just accused you of selling yourself. Did you miss that? Most women would have slapped my face, but you didn’t even get out of your chair.”

  Lydia didn’t trust herself to answer.

  Gideon strode across the room again, bent over her, his hands gripping the arms of her chair, effectively trapping her between his arms.

  “There’s nothing you can do to help,” Lydia nearly whispered. She simply couldn’t lie anymore. Nor could she meet his eyes, though the sunlight-and-shaving-cream scent of him filled her nose, and invaded all her other senses, too, and made her dizzy. “Please, Gideon—just go.”

  He didn’t move. His voice was a rumble, low and rough, like thunder on the distant horizon. “I’m not going anywhere—except maybe to find your bridegroom and tell him the wedding is off.”

  Lydia flinched, her gaze rising to collide with Gideon’s now. “You mustn’t do that!” she cried, aghast at the prospect. “Gideon, you mustn’t! This house, my aunts—”

  “Damn this house,” Gideon growled, backing up now, but just far enough to take hold of Lydia’s shoulders and pull her to her feet. “You are not marrying a man you don’t love!”

  At last, Lydia dredged up some pride. Lies hadn’t worked. Neither had the truth. Bravado was all that was left to her. “You can’t stop me,” she said fiercely.

  She saw his eyes narrow, and his jawline harden.

  “Yes, I can,” he ground out.

  “How?” Lydia challenged.

  And that was when he did the unthinkable.

  He kissed her, and not gently, the way a friend might do. No, Gideon Yarbro kissed her hard, as a lover would, slamming his mouth down on hers—and instinctively, she parted her lips. Felt the kiss deepen in ways she’d only been able to imagine before that moment.

  That dreadful, wonderful, life-altering moment.

  Gideon drew back too soon, and Lydia stood there trembling, as shaken as if he’d taken her, actually made her his own, right there in the parlor, both of them standing up and fully clothed.

  “It won’t be like that when he kisses you,” Gideon said, after a very long time. Then he let go of her shoulders, he turned, and he walked away. He opened the parlor doors and strode through to the foyer, then banged out of the house.

  Lydia couldn’t move, not to follow, not to sit down, not even to collapse. She simply could not move.

  Damn Gideon Yarbro, she thought. Damn him to the depths of perdition. He’d ruined everything—by being right.

  Jacob Fitch would never kiss her the way Gideon had, never send thrills of terrible, spectacular need jolting through her like stray shards of lightning. No, never again would she feel what she had before, during and after Gideon’s mouth landed on hers. In some inexplicable way, it was as though he’d claimed her, conquered her so completely and so thoroughly that she could never belong to Jacob, or any other man, as long as she lived.

  Gideon had aroused a consuming desire within Lydia, simply by kissing her, and simultaneously satisfied that desire. But—and this was the cruelest part of all—that sweet, brief, soul-drenching satisfaction had shown her what a man’s attentions—one certain man’s attentions—could be like.

  He’d left her wanting more of what she could never have—and for that, she very nearly hated him.

  The aunts and Helga rushed into the room, like a talcum-scented wind, pressing in around Lydia, so close she nearly flailed her arms at them, the way she would at a flock of frenzied, pecking crows.

  “You look ghastly!” one of the aunts cried, sounding delighted.

  “Do sit down,” begged the other.

  “Glory be,” Helga exalted, throwing up her hands like someone who’d just found religion. “That man kissed you like a woman ought to be kissed!”

  Lydia recovered enough to sweep all three women up in one scathing glance. “Were you peeking through the keyhole?” she demanded. It was as if another, stronger self had surged to the fore, pushed aside the old, beleaguered Lydia, taken over.

  That self was a wanton hussy, mad enough to spit fire.

  And not about to sit down, whether she looked “ghastly” or not.
/>   “Helga was,” Mittie said righteously. “Millie and I would never do any such thing. It wouldn’t be genteel.”

  “To hell with ‘genteel,’” Helga said joyously. “He might as well have laid you down and had you good and proper as to kiss you like that!”

  Mittie and Millie gasped and put their hands to their mouths.

  Even the wanton hussy was a little shocked.

  “Helga!” Lydia erupted, her face on fire.

  “Such talk,” Mittie clucked, shaking her head.

  “Major Bentley Alexander Willmington the Third used to whisper naughty things in my ear,” Millie confessed, succumbing to a dreamy reverie, “while we were rocking on the porch swing of an evening. Papa would have had him horsewhipped if he’d known.”

  “Millicent!” Mittie scolded.

  Helga laughed out loud. “Glory be,” she repeated, turning to leave the room. “Glory be!”

  “You don’t understand,” Lydia said, for the second time that afternoon. The wanton hussy had suddenly vanished, leaving the fearful, reluctant bride in her place, virginal and wobbly lipped and tearful. “Gideon accused me of—he left here in a rage—” She began to cry. “He’s never coming back.”

  “You’re a damn fool if you think that,” Helga answered, from the doorway. “He’ll be back here, all right, and in plenty of time to put a stop to this wedding foolishness, too.”

  “You didn’t see—he was furious—”

  “I saw him,” Helga countered, more circumspectly now that the glory bes had subsided. “He nearly knocked me down, storming through this doorway like he did. No denying that he’s fighting mad, either. But he’ll be back just the same. You mark my words, Lydia Fairmont. He’ll be back.”

  The prospect made Lydia feel both hope and fear, as hopelessly tangled as the mess of embroidery floss in the bottom of her sewing basket.

  Mittie, now solicitous, patted her arm. “Has your headache returned, dear?” she asked. “You really do look dreadful. Perhaps you should lie down, and Helga will bring you your supper in bed—”

  “I will not serve Miss Lydia’s supper in bed!” Helga shouted, already halfway to the kitchen, from the sound of her voice. “She’s not an invalid—so just forget that nonsense, all of you!”