Montana Mail-Order Wife Page 8

He looked up to see her waiting for him in the hallway, her head cocked with that adorably quizzical look that played havoc with his hormones. “Coming.”

  He started down the hall behind her, hoping that whatever Dan Howard did to find out who she was, he’d do it fast.

  AN HOUR LATER, Rachel sat in a booth across from Wade and Jordan and gazed in disbelief at the hamburger on the plate before her.

  “That’s one serving?” she asked.

  Wade nodded. “Montana-size. We appreciate good beef.”

  “But that’s enough food to feed a small town.”

  “Maybe a small Eastern town,” he said with a deprecating grin.

  Jordan had attacked his own megaburger and was shoveling in french fries as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. Pinned to his shirt pocket was a shiny silver badge that said Junior Deputy.

  Rachel reached for her burger and noticed a smudge of ink on her left index finger. “I’ve washed my hands twice since the fingerprinting, and I’m still covered in ink.”

  Jordan washed down his food with a swallow of milk. “The fingerprinting was cool, but I wish I had my own handcuffs.”

  “Maybe when you’re a few years older and can ride with the junior posse,” Wade suggested. His eyes met Rachel’s, and the warmth of his smile lit a bonfire in her abdomen.

  “I have to be sixteen.” Jordan looked crushed. “That’s eight more years.”

  “There must be something else exciting you can do in the meantime,” Rachel said. “What about that camping award you’re working on?”

  She’d learned all about his project the night of the fire, but she wanted Wade to hear. He scowled at the memory of the fire, but when she shook her head in warning, he relaxed and picked up her cue.

  “Right, Jordan,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

  Jordan paused with a french fry halfway to his lips. “It’s a badge for Scouts. I have to sleep outside, fix my own meals…” He hesitated and lowered his eyes. “Build my own fires. Stuff like that.”

  Wade nodded. “I’m sure between Rachel and Ursula, they can let you sleep out in the backyard—”

  “Wade Garrett!” Rachel felt her temperature rising. “All this gorgeous countryside everywhere you look, and you’d make your own son camp out in his backyard?”

  Jordan looked disappointed, an expression all too common for the youngster. She noted Wade had the decency to look uncomfortable, and she took satisfaction in his squirming.

  “I suppose,” he said, scratching his chin, “we could come up with a suitable spot, but he can’t go alone.”

  Rachel fixed him with a stare that she hoped would drill stone. “No, he can’t.”

  Jordan’s face shone with hope. “How about Keeler Mountain Lookout, Dad? Could we camp there? Can Rachel come with us?”

  “Whoa, buster.” Wade shook his head. “I’ve got a ranch to run. It’ll be weeks before—”

  Rachel got a grip on her temper and smiled her sweetest smile. Jordan needed an ally. He’d been at the mercy of his handsome father’s indifference for too long. “But, Wade, I’m sure Leo can handle things for a couple more days. And I’d like to see more of the country if I’m going to make my home here.”

  “Gosh, can we, Dad? Can we go tomorrow?”

  Rachel swallowed a tiny bite of her burger and wiped her lips. “Tomorrow would be good, wouldn’t it? That would have us back in time for Sue Ann Swenson’s barn dance.”

  WADE PAID THE BILL and followed Rachel and Jordan to the pickup. His head was swimming and his food sat uneasy in his churning stomach. He’d been bamboozled by the best of them. How could he say no when Rachel looked at him with those exotic green eyes? She had him so hornswoggled he didn’t know up from down.

  He wanted to find out who she really was. And he didn’t. Because once he knew her identity, she might have to go back where she came from.

  He wanted her to go. And he didn’t. He feared the consequences of falling in love again. He hadn’t fared well with Maggie. But he didn’t like the thought of going through life without Rachel, either.

  But she’s not Rachel, you dimwit. She’s probably someone else’s wife. A woman that special wouldn’t stay unattached for long. Someone with sense—and luck—would snap her up.

  He wanted to spend more time with Jordan. And he didn’t. He could hear his own father’s voice, praising the virtues of hard work, discipline and the straight and narrow. Affection and good times had had no place in Fulton Garrett’s philosophy. Had Wade’s own face ever shown the fear and unhappiness Jordan’s had? And if it had, had Fulton Garrett even noticed?

  Hell, Wade even wanted to be married again. And he didn’t. Marriage to Maggie had brought its own special hell, an agony he never wanted to experience again. But marriage to Rachel? The thought tantalized, seduced him. But what guarantee did he have that Rachel—if she wasn’t already married—wouldn’t be as disastrous a wife as Maggie?

  “Wade?” Rachel gazed at him from the cab. “Are you all right?”

  He jerked out of his thoughts to find himself standing by the driver’s door, his hand on the handle. Jordan and Rachel both watched him, their eyes filled with concern.

  “Indigestion,” he said with a grimace. “I’ll take some bicarbonate when we get back to the ranch.”

  He slid into the driver’s seat, started the truck and pulled out on the highway. He needed something, all right. But it sure as hell wasn’t bicarb. To cure what ailed him would take something a heck of a lot stronger than soda.

  He offered up a silent prayer that Dan would find Rachel’s real name quickly, and stepped on the gas.

  Chapter Seven

  Wade slowed his truck for the turn onto the ranch. Lefty Starr, Winchester rifle cradled in his arm, touched the brim of his hat in salute as the pickup passed.

  “Why’s Lefty at the gate with a gun?” Jordan asked.

  The wheels in Wade’s mind backpedaled as he thought fast. “Keeping out pesky real estate agents.”

  “You’ve never run ’em off like that before.” Puzzlement filled the boy’s voice.

  “Time they learned no means no.” Wade shifted uneasily in his seat. Lies didn’t sit easy on his lips. Unlike the way they had with Maggie. Lying had been her specialty.

  On the other side of Jordan, Rachel sat silent, but Wade could feel her gaze, which increased his uneasiness. The drive to the house seemed the longest he’d ever made, and when they arrived, he had to stop himself from leaping from the truck in relief.

  “Can I play with my new video game now?” Jordan held up the bag with his purchase from his allowance.

  Wade nodded. “Long as you take time to pack. We’ll leave for Keeler after breakfast tomorrow.”

  “Yippee!” Bounding out of the cab, Jordan all but ran over Rachel in his excitement.

  Rachel began gathering her packages from the passenger seat in the back of the cab, and Wade slowed his escape long enough to help.

  “If I ever knew anything about camping,” she said with an apologetic smile, “I don’t remember.”

  Wade tucked the last of her purchases under his arm. “Ursula will tell you what to take.”

  She stopped him with a hand on his arm as he headed up the front steps. “Wade?”

  He stifled a groan. When she turned that gut-kicking smile on him, his legs were weaker than a day-old calf’s. He hardened his expression. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for agreeing to go camping. It means a lot to Jordan.”

  “No problem.” He dumped the bags and boxes onto a rocker on the porch and headed to the barn as fast as his boots would carry him, prodded every step by the tines of a guilty conscience. He hadn’t agreed to the trip just for his son’s sake. He was simply a sucker for a pretty woman. A pretty woman he wanted to keep away from Larry Crutchfield, even if it meant climbing a damn mountain and spending the night away when he had work to do at home.

  RACHEL WATCHED WADE GO, then picked up the bundles he’d discarded, and entered the hou
se. She climbed the wide central staircase with its rustic bark banister and carried her purchases into the guest room. Painted the color of rich cream, with gabled windows hung with ruffled curtains sprigged with tiny blue flowers, the room exuded cheerfulness. A ruffled bedspread matched the curtains, and vases held generous cuttings of the climbing roses that rambled over the front of the house. Ursula had obviously decorated the room to make her feel welcome.

  As Rachel unpacked her new clothes, placed some in bureau drawers scented with floral sachets and hung others in the cedar-lined closet, a strange contentment came over her. In spite of her lack of memory, she felt comfortably at home in Wade’s house. She must have known what she’d been doing when she’d answered his ad for a wife. She had a feeling she was going to be very happy at Longhorn Ranch.

  Putting away the last of her clothes, she sprinted down the stairs. She found Ursula chopping weeds with a hoe in a large garden plot, the one area of the backyard not densely shaded by tall lodgepole pines. At Rachel’s approach, the old woman rubbed her back with the flat of one hand and pushed a calico sunbonnet off her brow with the other.

  “Find what you needed in Libby?” she asked.

  Rachel nodded. “And Wade’s agreed to take Jordan camping tomorrow. I’ll need you to tell me what to pack.”

  Ursula’s weathered face broke into a grin. “I’ll be happy to. I’ve had about all the weeding I can take for one day, anyhow.”

  They climbed the steps to the back porch, and Ursula brought a frosty pitcher of lemonade and tall glasses from the kitchen. When they’d both settled into chairs, Ursula indicated the mountain range that rose west of the ranch and pointed to a large dome-shaped mountain off to the right.

  “That’s Keeler. Wade’s daddy used to take him camping there when he was younger than Jordan.”

  “You knew Wade’s parents?”

  “Just Fulton, his daddy. His poor momma didn’t live long enough after Wade was born for me to know her. Fulton raised him on his own.”

  “What was Fulton like?”

  “You’ve seen his portrait, over the fireplace in the living room?”

  Rachel nodded. From his picture, Fulton Garrett had struck her as a restrained, unapproachable man.

  “Hard as nails and twice as cold, Fulton was.” Ursula took a sip of lemonade. “Made Wade walk the straight and narrow from the time he could toddle. Didn’t believe in spoiling a child with affection.”

  Rachel experienced a pang of sympathy for the little boy Wade had been. Knowing how Fulton had raised him went a long way toward explaining Wade’s relationship with Jordan. Maybe Wade hadn’t been so far off the mark with his crazy marriage scheme, after all. Jordan did need a mother, someone to love him, to take the rough edges off the way his daddy treated him.

  “You helped raise Wade?” Rachel asked.

  “Wiped his tears, sneaked him hugs when his daddy wasn’t looking. Fulton believed ‘coddling’ ruined a child.”

  “Wade was lucky to have you.”

  “And Jordan’s lucky to have you.”

  Ursula’s words were warm, but a shadow flitted across her face, as if she had remembered something unpleasant.

  “What about Jordan’s mother?” Rachel asked. “What kind of woman was she?”

  Ursula’s face shut tight as a miser’s wallet. “We don’t talk about Maggie around here. Ever. It’s like she never happened.”

  Rachel backed off the forbidden ground. “Have the Realtors been back today?”

  “Realtors?” Ursula looked puzzled. “Haven’t seen ’em.”

  Rachel remembered Jordan’s surprise at finding Lefty guarding the ranch entrance and the feebleness of Wade’s explanation, and wondered what Wade was trying to hide.

  Ursula took another sip of lemonade. She must have swallowed wrong, because she choked, turning red and wheezing before she caught her breath again. “Wade heard they were in the neighborhood. Doesn’t want ’em bothering him. Now about this camping trip.”

  Rachel suppressed a frown at the old woman’s rapid change of subject. Whatever the real reason Lefty was guarding the gate, neither Wade nor Ursula wanted her to know it.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, the pickup ascended toward the crest of Keeler Mountain, and Wade, listening for sounds of descending logging trucks, slowed as he rounded each switchback.

  At times, the road sliced through the deep shade of dense evergreens. At others, it skirted an open cliff face, presenting a panoramic view of Longhorn Valley, spread out far below, a crazy quilt of meadows, forests, lakes and rivers in a patchwork of greens and blues.

  Rachel’s exclamations of delight blended with Jordan’s at each new vista, and Wade couldn’t help comparing her childlike enthusiasm with Sue Ann’s Swenson’s indifference, bordering on contempt, toward the valley she’d lived in all her life. He quelled a shudder. Sue Ann would be waiting at the barn dance, anxious to get him in her clutches. She’d all but posted notice to the valley that she intended to be the next Mrs. Wade Garrett. And she wasn’t going to take kindly to Rachel. He sighed and shifted his attention back to the view. He’d handle that problem later.

  The more time he spent with Rachel, the more the irony of his predicament taunted him. She’d taken readily to Jordan, the ranch and Montana. He’d have to be dumb as a stump not to realize she’d taken to him, too. Under different circumstances, her easy adjustment would have had him hanging out the window, shouting his happiness to the world.

  But not knowing who she was, he’d have been better off if she’d holed up in her room and refused to have anything to do with him or Jordan. He grimaced inwardly. Maybe he should have hidden out someplace until Rachel’s true identity was resolved.

  Too late now.

  After the last switchback, the truck whined in low gear as it climbed the final approach to the mountaintop. Halfway to the peak, Wade stopped and tapped the horn several times. Its blare echoed across the valley.

  Rachel looked around, puzzled. “Is someone up here?”

  “That’s for the honeymooners,” Jordan said.

  “Honeymooners?”

  Wade pointed through a sparse stand of trees that stood between them and the mountain’s flat, grassy peak. A five-story tower topped by a wooden cabin, its poles secured by guy wires, loomed in the distance. “That’s Keeler Mountain Lookout.”

  “Does someone live there?” she asked.

  Wade shook his head. “Not anymore. Between air patrols and satellite coverage, most of these old fire lookouts are no longer needed.”

  Rachel seemed bewildered. “But Jordan said you tooted for the honeymooners.”

  Wade set the parking brake and twisted to face her. “When I was about four and Dad brought me here to pick huckleberries, he stopped his truck where we are now and blew the horn. When I asked why, he said he was alerting the honeymooners.”

  Jordan bounced on the seat. “Tell her about them.”

  Amusement replaced the confusion in Rachel’s green eyes, and her soft, rosy lips tilted in a beguiling smile. “Real honeymooners?”

  Wade nodded and repressed Jordan’s boisterousness with a firm hand on the child’s shoulder. “Folks were more inhibited in Dad’s day. He didn’t bother to explain what honeymooners were.”

  “I know.” Jordan puffed out his chest with self-importance. “They’re people on a vacation after they get married.”

  “That’s right,” Wade said, enjoying Rachel’s amused reaction, “but I didn’t know. All that registered in my four-year-old mind was moon. I thought my father was a magician who could summon creatures from the moon with his truck horn.”

  “But you learned otherwise when you met them,” Rachel said.

  “Nope. When I climbed those stairs—with Dad right behind, clutching my belt to make sure I didn’t fall—to that enchanted cabin in the sky, a young woman with a halo of golden hair and beautiful laughing eyes met me at the door. She even smelled pretty.”

  “Like flowers, you said,” Jord
an added.

  “Out of this world was the only way to describe her,” Wade said, “and at four, I fell in love for the first time in my life.”

  “I suppose she had a husband,” Rachel said wryly, “since she was on her honeymoon?”

  The late morning sun, streaming through the window behind Rachel, formed a shining aureole, backlighting her with an unearthly radiance. Like a thunderbolt, the resemblance between Rachel and the honeymooner of his childhood struck him. No wonder he’d been drawn to Rachel, even before she’d regained consciousness.

  “I liked her husband, too.” Wade dragged his attention from the vision beside Jordan and gazed toward the lookout tower. “He let me stand on a stool with glass insulators and locate our ranch through the firefinder.”

  “Glass insulators?” Rachel asked.

  “The glass on the feet of the stool protected the lookout against lightning during thunderstorms.”

  Wade’s voice was calm, but his insides quivered. Glass insulators wouldn’t have deflected the jolt he’d just received. With forceful clarity, he recognized he could no more distance himself from Rachel than the earth could break orbit from the sun.

  And even if he somehow managed, his world would be as bleak as empty space.

  “Why do you still honk for honeymooners?” she asked.

  “It’s a…” Jordan knotted his forehead in concentration “…a tradition.”

  Wade released the parking brake and eased the truck forward. “The couple returned the following year, and Dad brought me to see them. That was their last summer in the forest. Even so, for years, every time we came to Keeler, I’d ask Dad to toot the horn, hoping they’d somehow, magically, return.”

  “I wish I’d known you when you were little.” Rachel’s wistful tone wrenched his heart. “Your childhood sounds wonderful. I can’t recall anything about mine.”

  “You will,” he assured her.

  And when she did, she’d leave him, and he’d lose the best thing that had happened to him since Maggie. Before life with Maggie went sour.

  He glanced at his son, who strained against his seat belt, his thin face beaming with anticipation, and corrected his assessment. Rachel was the best thing since Jordan was born.