M. Donice Byrd - The Warner Saga (10 page)

Blake rankled at his assessment. How could a man of God tell her that it was better her parents were dead than for them to witness her lapse in judgment? “How, pray tell, does riding astride factor into this?”

“It’s not modest. It gets women all…worked up.”

Had it not been for Meredith’s downcast countenance, stained with embarrassment, Blake might have laughed in the man’s face but he could see the words were aimed to hurt her.

“What a bunch of hogwash! If riding astride got women worked up, every man I know would buy the women they court a horse and saddle instead of flowers. You have no right to cast aspersions on her when you don’t know what happened.”

“But I do know what happened. Unlike the lieutenant, I know this girl. It was just a matter of time until something like this happened. You just happen to be her unfortunate victim.”

Blake began to wonder if her reputation of being a hellion stemmed from the clergyman. He was halfway tempted to tell him he did coerce her or at least that he plied her with alcohol to seduce her.

“Thank heavens he doesn’t know about the whiskey and the poker,” Meredith said in a stage whisper as she raised a stubborn chin at the preacher.

Blake smiled at her. He would much rather see her defiant than cowed. “The devil certainly had you in his grip when you cheated.”

“You think you’re funny but you don’t know this girl. You’d be wise to take a firm hand with her.”

They held the small ceremony unde
r the big maple tree shading one corner of the house. Reverend Michelson presided with only the two Broberg males and the cavalry officer to witness the joining. Meredith fought back the tears welling up in her eyes as she stared into Reverend Michelson’s less than placid face. Everyone waited for her answer. She only glanced at Blake once. He was staring straight ahead refusing to look in her direction but the way the muscles in his jaw twitched gave her pause and she was sure he hated her and blamed her. It frightened her so much she didn’t look at him again.

She swallowed hard, knowing to keep him out of jail, she had to marry him. “No,” she protested vehemently.

The assembly of men stared at her incredulously. She had agreed to marry Blake Warner but now she refused to say her vows.

“You want me to vow to love and honor and I don’t know if I can or not and I’m pretty sure that obey part would be an outright lie.”

“I have no doubt,” Reverend Michelson said under his breath.

Blake shifted uncomfortably, the roiling in his
stomach drawing more of his attention than her refusal.

“For God’s sake, can’t you just ask her if she’ll agree to marry me or let her say she’ll try?”

The preacher pulled his shoulders back. “Fine. Meredith, do you agree to marry this man and will you try to love, honor and obey him?”

Meredith glanced at her bridegroom. He looked pale, his skin wore a fine sheen of perspiration and his jaw muscle continued to twitch as he clenched his teeth. She wondered if he was suffering a terrible attack of nerves. Obviously, he was every bit as upset over this union as she.

“Y-yes,” she said distractedly.

As the preacher began to read the vows to Blake, he interrupted. “I agree to marry her.
Period.”

“In the name of the Father, I now pronounce you husband-and-wife. She’s your problem now.”

No sooner were the words out of Josiah Michelson’s mouth, than Blake Warner vomited on the man’s shoes. Twice.

Meredith jumped backwards and her lips twitched upwards. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll skip the kiss.”

With a look of embarrassment, he shook his head as he reached in his pocket and pulled out his greenbacks. He peeled off a couple of bills and handed them to the minister. “Buy yourself a new pair,” he said thrusting the money into the man’s hand. It was all the apology Josiah Michelson would receive. “What time is the memorial service?”

The man’s eyes never left his feet as he alternately tapped the toes of his boots on the ground. His lips were curled up in a scowl of disgust. “Eleven.”

“Then we’ll wish you a good day until then.”

Blake led her by the elbow into the house and after rinsing out his mouth, sat down in a kitchen chair.

“I had hoped my cooking had improved,” she said as she wet a cloth at the basin and reached it towards his brow. He jerked away as if repulsed.

“I haven’t needed a mother since I was ten years old. I don’t need one now,” he snarled.

She stared at him as if he physically slapped her. A sickening feeling of dread spread through Meredith until she trembled with the reality of being married to a man she didn’t know. A few feet away, Blake Warner sat with his head propped in his hands. Meredith watched him cautiously, waiting for his reaction, waiting for the anger to be unleashed.

The silence stretched on, her tension growing with it. “I just kept your butt out of jail and I deserve at least a modicum of civility if not a bit of gratitude.”

He lifted his head and the proud jut of her chin attested to the return of the hellion.
His hellion. His
wife
. Criminy!

Bile burned his gullet threa
tening to make him sick again. Jeez, he hadn’t had a visceral reaction like that since the day he came home from school and found his mother dead. The sheer panic he felt made him lash out at her.

“Gratitude? Trust me; if I had known you were a virgin, I wouldn’t have touched you with a ten-foot pole. I was honest with you when I told you beforehand that I wasn’t promising you anything afterwards – a little honesty from you would have kept this from happening. But no, you had to bestow your little
gift
on me.”

Meredith’s eyes filled up with tears. The words he spoke had been aimed to hurt and they hit their mark. It
was true, he had said basically the same thing the night before and that made the words sting. “I’m sorry. We can leave as soon as I’m packed. I don’t want to go to the memorial service.”

His eyes were trained her retreating back. He swore under his breath and followed her into her room where she pulled a valise from under her bed.

“You’ll regret it if you don’t go.”

“It’s not going to be about them. It’s going to be about me and what I did and what terrible parents they must have been to raise such an unruly little shit like me. Every time I got in trouble publicly, he preached on sparing the rod and spoiling the child. And honestly, I’m just too embarrassed to go. Everyone will know I slept with a stranger. They will think I had no respect for my parents. Getting married the day of their memorial service is the equivalent of dancing on their graves.”

Blake tried to put himself in her shoes. At some point, he’d have to face his own friends with his new bride. No one there would know the scandal involved with this marriage but everyone here would. He wished his presence could make it better but even if he pretended love at first sight, the truth was already out there. Showing off his wealth to these people or implying he forced her, would not change anything.

“I’ll make sure their graves get marble tombstones. You can have anything you want engraved on them.”

Her anger softened at his thoughtfulness. “Thank you.”

As Meredith began packing, Blake wrote a letter to the minister taking the blame for not allowing her to go to the service. Even if she never knew he accepted responsibility, it was important to him that her neighbors not view her in a worse light than they already did. He asked him to distribute the farm animals to people in the area who might need them and find an attorney to help with her parents’ finances and property.

When he finished, he entered her room to find her trying to figure out how to stuff a riding skirt into a valise already brimming with several skirts and dresses. With a look of defeat she held the outfit against her body as she began digging through the suitcase looking for something to discard.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you can do the sewing it’ll take to replace the dresses which won’t fit.”

He meant only to tease her a little but his tone held no humor in it. Damn. How had he gotten himself in such a mess? How many women in Chicago had set their sights on him? Not once had he come close to the altar. 
He really had no one to blame but himself. He should have never made love to her nor returned for the straight razor.

She stiffened her spine. “I’ll learn. And I’ll learn how to cook, too. I’m a hard worker, Mr. Warner. I’ll keep your house spotless and your garden tidy. And – and I’ll sell my saddle to pay you back for the material for the dresses if I have to.”

A half-smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. He liked her spirit. “I don’t doubt that you would. However, that won’t be necessary. I am by no means impoverished and from what I’ve seen of your wardrobe, most of it needs to be replaced anyway. I have not decided what to do with you yet but if I do decide to acknowledge you publicly as my wife, it would not do to have you dressed in rags nor in your first attempts of domesticity. I do not own a house for you to clean, so, also, I have no kitchen for you to attempt to poison me with your cooking. Should I acknowledge you and buy a house, it would not do to have my wife cooking or cleaning. I’m afraid I have a social standing to keep up and would not want my friends to think me miserly.”

Meredith absently set the riding habit across the valise. “What do you mean
if
you acknowledge me?”

“Would you have me bandy the truth around? I’ll not have a wife with a sullied reputation. Don’t you think my friends might think it odd that I left town for a couple of weeks and came back married? That’s more than I have a stomach for.”

Meredith resisted the urge to comment on his stomach in light of the way he threw up all over the preacher’s Sunday shoes.

“So you want to keep me hidden away like a mistress?” she asked raising her voice. “Or perhaps you prefer to live openly with me and let everyone think I’m
no more than a brazen doxy and not let them know we ever spoke vows together?”

She stood in front of him now, hands on hips yapping with the ferocity of the small terrier.

“I only thought there might be a better way to go about this than to just show up with you and say you are my wife. I just haven’t figured out yet how to do it.”

Blake’s mood was like a cast iron pan over a flame coaxed with kerosene. The pan was blackened with years of unsettled feelings toward his father for seducing his mother away from a family who loved her to become his mistress and for fathering him out of wedlock. And it was blackened further by his mother’s death which left him abandoned to the streets for a cruel winter. This was the side of Blake he hid from the world with a politician’s smile. This was the real Blake Warner.

The boiling water inside filled with self-recriminations roiled wildly until every drop of moisture had evaporated leaving only a red-hot pan. Had Meredith known her first attempts to communicate with him would sizzle and evaporate like an errant drop of water; she might have given him more time to cool down.

“For what it’s worth,” Meredith began as she pulled Viper alongside Blake and his horse as they traversed the rutted road through the dense forests. “I’m only sorry we got caught. I’m not sorry for what we did.”

Blake turned in his saddle to address her and found they sat eye to eye with her on her oversized horse and him on his mare. “You’re not sorry we got caught. Why would you be? Look at the prize you won.”

Meredith stared boldfaced at him. What conceit?

“You put way too much value on your looks, Mr. Warner. It’s ashamed your personality doesn’t match.”

He shrugged as if to say the barb didn’t stick. “I’m sure you’ll get past it when you realize the kind of money you married into.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re more impressed with your wealth than I am. As long as I have clean clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in and my horse to ride, I am pretty well content.”

Her mind continued to add to the list but she did not vocalize the thoughts. The man frustrated her to no end. She only wished to tell him she enjoyed making love with him and he picked a fight. It wasn’t her fault he assumed she was married. If he didn’t want to make love to a virgin, he should have asked her if she’d been with a man before. It wasn’t as if he had a shy bone in his body. He had no qualms about telling her she should have no expectations of the future relationship.

“That’s because you’ve never had anything. Once you get a taste, you’ll become insatiable in your
spending.”

“I don’t want your stupid money, Blake,” she shouted putting her hands on her hips.

“You say that now but wait until you have your first jewels and silk gowns and fur coats.”

“Every coat I’ve ever owned was lined with fur.”

“Rabbit fur, I suppose.”

His derogatory tone made her feel defensive. “
What’s wrong with that? It’s warm and soft.”

He shook his head.
“Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with wearing pelts…if you’re a trapper’s wife.”

Meredith had never been made to feel inferior because of her social status or lack thereof in her life and she’d be damned if she’d let Blake treat her that way.