The Bridal Arrangement Read online

  She knew that he would. In time. Once he got to know her better. Once he understood that she was a woman, not a child. Once she showed him what she had learned from her parents about love.

  And once she proved to him that she could be more than an obligation—which, she understood, was all she was to him right now.

  Disappointed in that knowledge, but not defeated, she eased the dress over her head. She could make him love her. Even if she wasn’t perfect.

  Her gaze flashed quickly away from the mirror as she reached behind her back to fasten the many satin-covered buttons on the gown. No, she wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t going to think about that. She wasn’t going to let it interfere with her wedding day.

  A twinge of guilt, the same one that had been niggling since Lee had explained why he was marrying her, suggested that she should think about it. Lee really didn’t understand what he was getting into. She should have talked to him about it. But, since it was something that had never been talked about in this house, she didn’t even know how to start.

  In her entire life, she couldn’t remember her parents ever saying the word. Doc Lundstrum had been the one to fill in the blanks for her. He’d been the one to put a name to the force that caused her to lose herself, to lose time, to lose memories and, it seemed, lose the right to live a normal life.

  Epilepsy.

  She closed her eyes. Swallowed.

  No. It wasn’t a word that had ever been spoken in this house. And it wasn’t something that was easy to talk about with your prospective husband.

  Yet, shouldn’t he be armed with enough information to decide if he really wanted to go through with this?

  He knows.

  “He knows,” she said aloud this time, working to convince herself as she reached for the fingertip veil crowned in baby’s breath and white satin ribbon and allowed fear to trample over the guilt. Fear, prompted by an uncharacteristic selfishness and a buoyant hope, outdistanced the guilt and abetted her conviction.

  “But what does he know?” she asked point-blank to the woman in the mirror. “What does he really know?”

  Only what her momma had let him or anyone else know.

  “Don’t worry princess. No one saw anything.”

  “Saw what, Momma? What happened? What did I do?”

  The answers had always been the same.

  “It was just a little dream, baby. That’s all that happened. You just had a little dream and now you need to rest.”

  She had no memories of life without the threat of seizures, just like she had no memory of what happened to her during one. She remembered only the aftermath, countless incidents of waking up in her bed, or other places, and the humiliation of not knowing how she had gotten there coupled with the headaches that followed and kept her down, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days.

  The rush of frustration—of being totally out of control, totally vulnerable to the disease, of a loss of time and self that sometimes gave her nightmares—was far too familiar. She fought it back and settled the veil on her head.

  And then she justified. Maybe it was best for now that Lee didn’t know what to expect. She’d been four years old when he’d left Shiloh and Sundown, Montana, for college in Texas. As the years passed and he’d made those rare but treasured visits home, he’d never actually witnessed a seizure—at least she wasn’t aware that he had. If he found out the whole of it before he got to know her for who she was…well. He’d get that look in his eye. The one she’d seen so many times before from others. The one that spoke of wariness and pity, or worse, ridicule and rejection. She would lose him before she ever had the chance to love him.

  From downstairs, the grandfather clock in the hall chimed the quarter hour. Her stomach did a little flip-flop as she sat down at her dressing table and reached for a new tube of lipstick.

  Less than an hour.

  A lifetime of waiting and he’d be here in less than an hour.

  That’s all she had to think about today. Not the epilepsy, not the fact that her momma couldn’t be with her, not the fact that her daddy couldn’t give her away.

  She brought the creamy, rose-colored gloss to her lips, surprised to see how violently her hand was shaking.

  It’s just nerves, she told herself, and frowned as the chimes sounded again.

  She didn’t think about reaching for a tissue so she was puzzled as, with a disconnected sort of awareness, she watched the unsteady motion of her hand lift one from the box and touch it to the light sheen of perspiration that had broken out across her brow.

  And then she flinched when the chimes sounded again. Louder this time. Then again. Louder still.

  Nausea rolled through her stomach in a heavy, arching wave.

  “Why don’t they stop?” she whispered, courting a shifting confusion she couldn’t identify, fighting a creeping, disassembled anxiety that seemed to seep into her body from the outside in.

  She tried to laugh at her bridal jitters but ended up closing her eyes to steady herself instead. When she opened them and met them in the tri-fold mirror, fear mushroomed and grew. She tried desperately to deny what she saw. A slight dilation of her pupils. A glassy mist covering eyes that looked vacant and unfocused.

  She slowly looked away, and on a level she couldn’t quite comprehend, watched the pretty silver tube of lipstick slip and, in slow motion, tumble end over end from her suddenly rigid fingers. It fell to her dressing table with a sharp, deafening clatter, then rolled to the sound of thunder before dropping with a booming crash to the floor.

  The noise was piercing. The serrated, insistent clamor of the chimes got louder and louder until she clapped her hands to her ears and whimpered at the stab of pain the sound shot through her head.

  “Oh, please,” she pleaded, as the part of her brain that clung precariously to cognizant thought sounded the alert and she suddenly understood what was happening.

  Seizure.

  “No…oh, please, no. Not now. Not today.”

  But even as she prayed to a god that for whatever reason chose not to answer, a too-familiar metallic taste flowed into her mouth and she knew she was powerless against it. As she had always been powerless against it.

  On shaking legs she rose to her feet just as the walls began a surreal dance that made them shrink, then swell, then close around her like a vise. She stumbled across the room, groping for the tall corner post on her four-poster bed, then gripped it with a soft cry as the noise exploded like crystal shattering against steel.

  She clung to the bedpost, but her strength, like her hope, deserted her. On a level that was once distant and oh, so near, she felt the smooth, spindled wood slip through her hands like water, slide like cool rain against her cheek as she sank to the floor in a pool of white satin and crumpled lace.

  A tear trailed down her temple and trickled into her hair as she lay back, stared at the ceiling and gave in to the void…defeated, defenseless, completely vulnerable in the darkness that took her.

  The beauty of the day and the joy of her anticipation—gone. Her sense of self and time and hope—lost, just like her awareness of the moments that passed, of the actions of her busy hands that flitted clumsily to her throat to button buttons that did not exist, then button them all over again.

  The childlike whisper that echoed through the empty room was hers. She didn’t hear it. No one heard it.

  No one heard the haunting loneliness, the tortured helplessness of the words she chanted over and over and over. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry….”

  Two

  Four major rivers and at least a dozen minor tributaries snaked across the cracked plaster ceiling in room number six of Sundown, Montana’s ancient and only hotel. Lee knew, because he’d been awake half the night staring at them. Staring and thinking and wishing there was a better way.

  At 9:15 the next morning he still hadn’t come up with one. So he’d dressed in his black suit and tie, stowed his luggage and the few belongings he’d brought wi
th him from Houston in the back of his truck and he’d headed for Shiloh. And his bride.

  A half an hour later, as he made the final turn up the narrow, rutted lane to Shiloh, a stray, two-week-old memory entered and softly settled.

  I’ve ordered sunshine.

  Despite everything that was wrong about what he was doing, one corner of his mouth edged up in a tight smile. It looked like Ellie was going to get her order filled on her wedding day.

  Golden sunlight flickered through the budding aspen and shimmering evergreens flanking the high meadows, spreading warmth and the promise of summer over the slowly greening range, and gilding the vista of snow-capped peaks in the distance.

  Easing back on the gas, Lee thought about the first time he’d made this trip up the mountain. He’d been ten years old. Ten going on fifty. He’d been angry, distrustful and so needy and full of fear that his gut still tightened at the memory.

  Will and Clare Shiloh had changed all that. They’d saved him from the mean back streets of Denver. They’d brought him to Sundown. More specifically, they’d brought him to Shiloh Ranch. Twenty-three years later it had been Will who had brought him home again.

  For what seemed like the hundredth time, he went over the string of events that had brought him back to the mountain. It always replayed the same—just like his conversation with his boss, Curt Tompkins.

  “Is it more money you need, Lee? Hell, we can work something out. I don’t want to lose you. And I can’t believe you really want to leave Houston for some little inkspot of a town in Podunk, Montana.”

  Lee had hated letting Curt down. He’d been the manager of Curt’s corporate spread for eight of the past ten years.

  “Dave knows the ropes,” Lee had said. “He’d be the one I’d look toward to take over. He can step in without missing a beat.”

  Curt had just shaken his head. “I don’t get it.”

  And he never would, Lee had realized, so he’d simply stated the bottom line. “I owe Will Shiloh my life. Now I’m going to pay my debt.”

  He tipped his sunglasses up to the top of his head and squinted against the glare of sun bouncing off the truck’s black hood. Yeah. He would pay his debt. Trouble was, Ellie was going to pay, too. It didn’t help his conscience any to know that she was too young and too naive to realize what this little arrangement was going to cost her.

  He knew though. Just like he knew that no amount of justifying could pit duty against guilt and balance the scales—or minimize his disappointment that Shiloh had come with strings attached.

  He looked around him at everything that would officially become his in a little less than an hour. At one time owning Shiloh would have been an unreachable dream. He let go of a grim snort. “And look at me now.”

  He was a long way from where he’d come from. He’d like to think he was more than the boy who had cut his teeth on the bad side of the tracks. He hadn’t understood it then. He hadn’t cared that he’d been shuffled through an understaffed and inadequate social system by the time the Shilohs had found him. What he’d understood was hostility. What he’d understood was abuse. That had been life.

  As young as he’d been, he’d known way too much about hunger. Way too much about pain. Most of all, he’d known about loss. He’d known it like a stray dog knew the hollow ache of an empty belly. And he’d known it every day of his life until Will and Clare had taken him in. Because they were kind people. And because, in their late forties, they had given up on having children of their own.

  He let the truck roll to a stop at the top of the rise, eased it into park and thought about everything they had offered him—mountain wilderness, patience, hard work and endless understanding. In return he’d given them ten kinds of grief that first year. No matter what he’d done they hadn’t sent him away.

  “Run all you want, boy,” Will had told him one midnight when he’d tracked him down near Butte. “Do your worst. You will always have a home here.”

  Significant. For the first time in his life he considered that he might actually be significant until, finally, he’d begun to believe that to Will and Clare, at least, he was.

  Propping an elbow on the open window frame, he worried an index finger over his upper lip and stared at the house just the other side of the rise. The house where he’d known love. The house where the woman—barely a woman—waited to become his bride.

  Ellie. Ellie, who he remembered as a sweet, laughing toddler. Then a shy little girl with a big bad crush on him with her guileless eyes and endless smiles. Ellie who was never supposed to be.

  He remembered every moment of the day Clare had nearly died giving birth to the child she and Will had given up on the idea of ever having. He’d been fourteen—and he’d wanted to hate the wrinkled, mewling little thing that had almost killed Clare and had shaken the only firm turf he’d ever stood on. But from the first moment of her pretty pink little life, Ellie Shiloh had enchanted anyone who set eyes on her— Lee had been no exception.

  Will and Clare had been amazed by her. They had sheltered this special gift that had brought a dawn sunshine into their twilight lives, moved heaven and earth to ensure that nothing would ever happen to the miracle that life had previously denied them.

  It had been subtle and no way intentional, but Lee had felt the shift just the same. He was on the outside of the candy store looking in again. It had been a wake-up call. A reminder that as much stock as he placed in the Shilohs’ love, he could only count on himself for the long haul. He’d also understood the deeper significance—Ellie had been born a Shiloh, and for as much as Will and Clare had given him, they had never offered him their name.

  And it was only at times like these, he thought grimly—when he thought too much, brooded too much—that he let that lone fact bother him.

  He drew in a deep breath of the fresh, mountain morning, adjusted his necktie, smoothed a hand down the lapels of his suit coat. And sat there, a million memories both drawing him to and keeping him from driving that final stretch into the valley.

  Ellie had just had her fourth birthday when he’d gone off to college on a rodeo scholarship. She’d been eight, when at twenty-two, he’d received his degree in business management, sixteen when he’d come back to Sundown to mourn the death of the only mother he’d ever known.

  And now Will was gone, too. Grief pressed down, cold and heavy. He flexed his fingers around the leather-wrapped steering wheel. It was just a month ago that Will had called him home. Just three weeks since he’d lay dying and extracted a promise Lee would give his own life to keep.

  “You know she’s special, our Ellie,” Will had whispered as he lay in his hospital bed, shrunken and frail, the droning beep of the monitors seeming to ration out each heartbeat. “She’s not strong like most folks, Lee. She’s…delicate. She needs you, boy. And I need you to make sure nothing and no one ever hurts her or takes what we worked all our lives to preserve for her.”

  Delicate. That had been the word Clare and Will had always used in regard to Ellie’s condition. On a gut-deep level, Lee had known that delicate didn’t even begin to cover it. Admittedly, he didn’t know what he should about her epilepsy. He’d never wanted to know. He wasn’t very proud of that fact, but Clare and Will had never volunteered information, and frankly, that had been just fine with him. Hell. When the seizures had started, he’d been a kid himself. It was the best excuse he could come up with.

  Honest truth? It scared him, what happened to her. It scared him for her. It scared him because he’d felt helpless…and excluded.

  “Fever,” Clare would say when a seizure would grab her, then she’d shoo him quickly out of the room. “Just a fever. Little ones have ’em all the time. She’ll grow out of it.”

  Only she hadn’t grown out of it. And he hadn’t been around to see what happened to her. Once he’d made the break from Shiloh, he hadn’t come home often and he’d kept the visits brief. It became easy—convenient—not to wonder or worry or feel guilty because it was happen
ing to her and not him and that he still couldn’t do anything to help.

  Well. Now he was back. And now…now he would take care of her. He’d promised Will.

  He hadn’t thought once about saying no to Will’s dying request to take over Shiloh Ranch. And, yeah, he’d figured that Ellie would come with the package—just not quite the way Will had in mind.

  He’d been stunned when Will had asked the unthinkable.

  “You’re the only one I trust with her, son. You’re the only one I can count on to do right by her.”

  Lee would have bled and died for Will Shiloh. For the giving man who had loved him without qualification, who had made him the man he was today. The man who was about to marry Will’s pride and joy—because Will had asked him to.

  He shifted in the seat, watched a curtain in a second-story window part, then fall back into place. It was going to happen. As sure as the sun came up it was going to set tonight with Ellie as his wife. He’d left the life he’d built in Texas, the friends, the women who had been a part of it.

  “And you’ve sat here too damn long telling yourself you’re doing Ellie wrong, when the fact is we’re both getting everything we want,” he muttered aloud, as if hearing it would make it all right.

  Ellie wanted him—at least she thought she did. He wanted Shiloh, the place that had been in his blood, in his head, in his heart since the first day he’d set foot on the mountain. And Will had been right about one thing. Ellie did need someone to take care of her. It had just as well be him.

  He slid his sunglasses back in place, eased the truck into gear and rolled down the last stretch home.

  Home.

  Where his child bride waited with trusting eyes and a hopelessly romantic soul.

  Ellie was slow to answer his knock. When she finally opened the door, Lee was stunned all over again by the fragility of her beauty.

  For a long moment he didn’t speak—wasn’t sure that he could. He just stood there, luggage in hand, flooded with foolish notions of fairy-tale princesses in shimmering satin and huge, enchanting eyes. And he wondered what the hell he was getting himself and her into.